Frustration

Today the weather was clear and bright and I decided to take advantage of this by mowing out lawns and generally tidying up the garden, as soon as the grass had dried.  By about 0930 hours I had the mower out and was mowing our lower lawn around the fruit and nut trees.  This went uneventfully and having completed it I moved up to the lawn directly behind the house.  I did not complete my first run around the edges of the lawn, before I broke the mower.  Our builders have a disgusting habit of throwing any bricks or other waste materials out into the garden and in this instance had thrown half a house brick into the grass.  I had probably missed this the last couple of times I mowed, but this time I hit it square on and it was thrown up under the mower damaging the brake linkage.  Initially after a few choice words I went indoors and had a coffee before doing anything else, then watched the qualifying of the Formula 1.  Immediately after this I started working on the mower, but it took me until about 1700 hours to get the mower into full working order, the problem as not particularly difficult to fix, but to get to the problem involved stripping off the cutter deck and various other parts of the mower so that one could get one’s arm into the linkage, which was deeply buried among the other components under the floor of the mower.  Mrs GOG was moving the controls above the floor, while I was scrunched up underneath trying to locate items by feel; without Mrs GOG’s help I could not have carried out this repair.  Once the repair was complete I was able to continue the mowing, but any chance of doing the other garden work had been lost.  Today’s blip was taken by Mrs GOG, of me about to start removing the cutting deck.
  
Over the past few weeks I have gone very carefully over the garden, picking up bricks, pipes, bits of wood, chunks of concrete, odd metal fittings and other building debris from various locations.  I thought I had done a good job, but I now suspect that there could be quite a few surprises waiting for me to find them.  On the previous occasion when I mowed the lawn, I drove over a piece of wood with a nail sticking up out of it, puncturing one of the driving wheels of the mower, which I had to repair.  I wonder what the next surprise will be.