Gasoline Powered Stupidity

It's going to be one of those days. I can SMELL it already.

When people talk about the best laid plans of mice and men, they totally discount the best laid plans of women who hate mice and the mess they leave behind or this average woman's total lack of mechanical skill.

It isn't like I am stupid.

Right? Right . . . ?

I decided that since we have ordered ourselves a new cordless, battery-powered mower, that I would go out and reclaim the gasoline from the old mower before I forgot about it yet again. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned. Old Ben said that and Old Ben wouldn't lie about a thing like that.

Back in a minute or two, okay?

Well, that didn’t work out according to Hoyle. This is where the part about mice and men and gasoline comes into the equation and I was never that great in math. Fact is, when I add that combination up, I have visions of an Aquanet fired potato gun launching the mice into a field for distance. But that is another journal entry entirely.

Logically thinking to myself that the little tank on the mower was on one side and that if somehow I could tip the mower over onto that side that I could get the gasoline to gravity flow out and into some sort of vessel (no, not the kind with a mast and a sail, silly!), that I could just easily put it into the gas guzzling van that is my transportation. That sounds like a plan to me.

Digging through the junk in our storage shed, I came up with a moment of brilliance and what I believed to be a brilliant solution (Look, if you are going to be sticky about the definition of brilliance, then we are gonna tangle!). I wound up successfully turning the mower on its side, and then dumping the mower’s tank into a hospital bedpan (no kidding - doesn't everyone have one of these in their storage building?) and, in what I believe to be a second flash of brilliance brought on by the query of "how do I get this into the tank now", I used an improvised funnel that I fashioned from cutting the bottom off of one of those funnel necked STP bottles to get it from the bedpan cum gasoline receptacle into the tank.

Then, the tragedy unfolded as surely as a paper hat in a gale. As the gasoline from the bedpan dribbled down my hands and sort of into the funnel (STOP LAUGHING!!), I realized that there was an issue I had failed to take into account. Okay, more than one issue.

The little improvised funnel just wasn't going to stay still in the tank's neck or hole or door or opening or whatever the manly men call that doohickey where pump jockeys stick in the nozzle* to fill up my car while I fiddle with the radio (*See, I know a technical gasoliney sounding word!).

Given the choice between holding the little funnel in place and/or continuing the baptism of octane washing over my hand or allowing the precious elixir of power to go into the grass, I held onto the little funnel and remembered that years ago gasoline used to be 35 cents a gallon and this would never have happened. We would have sold the broken mower with its 'free tank of gas'. I finally got the rest of the gasoline from the mower’s refill tank poured in safely.

Now my hands smell like 87 octane.

Aren’t you jealous? Despite my having washed my hands thoroughly, I still smell like gasoline. I will continue to wash them as some vision of Lady Macbeth of the petroleum era flashes before my eyes. Maybe by next week they will smell like something else. But at the price of gasoline right now, dang it, this OUGHT to be a turn on. To somebody besides the crusty old man at the Wavaho who ALWAYS smells like gasoline and isn't a turn on in a dark room with desperation in the air along with the diesel. This stuff costs almost as much as that fancy perfume folks go bankrupt to buy!

Oh well.

I will console myself by looking at the online brochure on the new mower. I will not, however, ‘lick my wounds’, because then I would have gasoline on my tongue. And that would just be wrong . . . and nasty.