Last weekend, I was so excited to start that 40 year old tiller, and get the garden ready to plant. I yanked on that rope about 200 times, until I was too tired to till, even if it did start, and realized that the darn thing just wasn't going to start this year. I suppose I should be grateful that it's started all the other years, given I found it in a shed in a house I bought years ago, and have no idea how old it is. It has never had any service and has faithfully started once each year, to till my garden. Now, it's going to the big old garden in the sky, and I had to either rent a tiller, or hire a person to till my garden.
After calls to a couple of "guys" in the paper, I realized that, unless I was fine with starting my garden in July, I was going to have to go the rent a tiller route. I called the tiller rental place (well, they rent other stuff too, I just needed a tiller for now) and they reserved one for me. The "8 horse power, rear tine tiller for the avid gardener." This sounded like me, right? I had a date with a tiller! Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m. for 2 hours, this tiller and I were going to take some names and till some dirt!
I got up, showered (Why shower and then do 2 hours of sweaty work? Well, who can report to pick up a tiller, at a place where one has never been, dirty, with hair standing on end, in less than fashionable dress? Not I!) and headed off to get my little tiller. Upon arrival, I reported to the counter and signed over my life, then drove "around to the dock, with my tailgate down," and backed up to pick up the tiller. To my shock, this thing they were pushing out to put in the truck was NOT little! It was HUGE! I pretended as if to me, in my fashionable yoga pants and running shoes, this was just an every day thing. When the rental guy said, "Have YOU ever run one of these before?" With a rather large voice of doubt, I quickly replied, "Well, I do have a front tine tiller at my house, but it died, which is why I need to rent this one, and I run the mower all the time." I was pretty sure he hid a smile, but I felt exonerated! He proceeded to show me how to operate this beastly piece of machinery, then loaded it on my truck. We bungeed it in place, and he closed the tailgate, then said, "Have fun," with a little too much glee.
As I drove away, the two guys on the dock were slapping each other and laughing rather hard, but I'm sure it was about something entirely different than me, in my cute outfit with manicured nails, taking that tiller home to plow up my garden.
When I got home, Jazzman was still asleep. Now Jazzman hasn't been feeling well, and I was NOT about to wake him up and ask him to help. It's not that he wouldn't have done so, he would have gladly come out and done what he could, but with his health issues, I really do try to do as much of the heavy stuff as I can. Jazzman is the BEST support any girl could ask for, and he never demands that I do anything. There are times when I get myself in a little deeper than I should, and this might've been one of those times....especially since I didn't have a dock on which to unload this beast of a machine.
I had some ramps, which I put up on the truck, and then proceeded to use my (rather lack of) brawn to unload this thing. As I muscled it down off the truck, it built up speed and moved rather quickly toward the Jazzman's car bumped. I was thankful (for about a second) that I was between it and the car, right up until it was stopped from hitting the car by crushing my shin/calf between it and the car bumper. I didn't need to push it away because the force of the blow bounced it off my shin and took care of that all by itself! I sat up against the hood of the car, just breathing and trying not to cry, or scream, or throw up! I definitely wasn't going to look at the shin, because I was pretty sure the bone was poking through! (O.K. I can tend to be over dramatic and think the worst, but it hurt, seriously hurt!)
After a couple of minutes, some deep breathing, and a little bit of swearing, I put some weight on it, and realized that I had a rather serious charlie horse too. There was more swearing, some limping, more walking, some swearing, some limping, some swearing, a little bit of rubbing, and some (finally) pulling up of the pant leg and looking at the damage. The wound wasn't that bad, a little bit of a scrape on the shin, a bruise on the calf, and a pretty big goose egg swelling, but all in all, with no bone exposed, I figured I'd live. By this time, I realized I'd probably wasted about 15 minutes of tiller time, and it was time to get to work.
The tiller and I drove ourselves over to the garden and for the next two hours managed to turn what was a pretty big weed patch into a nicely ground up bit of dirt, ready for planting. It was hard work, even with that nice big tiller, and I was sweaty, dirty, and certainly not cute, when I was done. I had only rented it for two hours, and knew it had to be back, so I hosed it off, and loaded it in the truck. This time, I used the power to drive it up the ramp, rather than my (lack of ) brawn, and successfully got it in place without incident. I returned it to the rental place with not a minute to spare!
