Bloody weekend

Another lawn care disaster

Earlier in the summer, I had let my grass grow quite long. It was long enough to completely obscure a box turtle. As I pushed through a very tall and thick patch, I heard a sickening thud. Bye, bye turtle.

Yesterday, I decided to mow the lawn before it reached turtle depth. The mowing part went fine. Then I took out the line trimmer to neaten things up. I was trimming along the concrete steps that lead to the front door when I heard a “thud” followed immediately by a “whack”.

I had managed, apparently, to whack a small stone which shot like a bullet into the storm door on our front entry. I looked at the glass and it had the coolest looking spider web pattern to it. The stone had it near the upper left corner and the web radiated from the contact point.

Fortunately, the glass was tempered so it didn’t shatter and send shards everywhere. Instead, th glass stayed in place, broken into thousands of tiny pieces. I touched the pane and the pieces rained down onto the front steps. So much for my afternoon nap. I spent the next 90 minutes carefully sweeping up the specks of glass. Once I had them all collected I packed them in a pair of cardboard boxes marked “GLASS” for the trash pick up on Monday.

The frame of the storm window had glass bits all around the inside opening. I used duct tape to keep them in place and put the frame under our sunroom for disposal during our next special trash pickup.

Remarkably, despite being on aspirin therapy for blood thinning, I managed to only incur one pin prick on a knuckle on my left hand during the clean up process. Home free? Nope. Mrs. Rootchopper put a screen panel in the empty space in the storm door. I finished my trimming and opened the screen door to go back inside. The door, lightened by the absence of glass, sprung back and whacked me in the elbow. I ended up with a nasty bloody welt on my elbow.

How’d he do that?

I stayed up late watching the last few episodes of Season 3 of Lupin, a French Netflix series. It’s about a resourceful master thief in Paris. Assane Diop, a Senegalese immigrant who learns his wily craft from a series of 1920s novels about Arsene Lupin, a gentleman thief. It’s funny and clever. Diop, a larcenous magician, pulls off impossible robberies, often taking advantage of his blackness that makes him socially invisible in lily-white upper crust Paris. Jump-cut flashbacks are used to demonstrate how the deeds are done. Despite being dog tired, I slept poorly and managed only about five hours of sleep.

More blood

This morning I donated blood for the second time this summer. This time, instead of a whole blood donation, which involves extracting a pint of blood, I made a power red (or double red) donation. In this procedure, blood is extracted into a machine that separates hemoglobin (oxygen carrying red-blood cells) from the rest of your blood (plasma and platelets). Thus, two units of hemoglobin are donated instead of one. The remaining extracted blood augmented by some saline is returned to your arm via the same needle and tube.

The procedure and my lousy night’s sleep left me a bit groggy. No riding for me today. The morning was cool and rainy, and the rest of the day filled with playoff baseball games so I picked a good day to power down.

I won’t be able to donate again until February. It will take a couple of weeks to build up my hemoglobin to normal levels, just in time for the last two fall bike events: the Great Pumpkin Ride in Warrenton, Virginia and the Cider Ride in DC and suburban Maryland.