Yarding

This weekend saw a bit of yard work being done, and it all started with my R65 leaking gas all over the place.

So it's Thursday morning and I decide to ride Orthrus, my R65, in to work, since the weather is finally half decent and I haven't stretched its legs in a while. I turn on the petcock, start it up, and it's definitely in mosquito fogging mode. I give it a quick look over and I see that the carbs on both sides of the bike are leaking gas out of the overflow, indicating that the floats are stuck. I start giving the float bowls a bit of percussive maintenance to try to free them up, and notice that the bike seems to be wet with fuel above the carbs too, and that's when I spot a pinhole in the fuel line.

I didn't ride Orthrus to work on Thursday. I shut off the gas, pushed it back to its parking spot, and rode Rabbit Season instead.

Fast forward to Saturday and I head out on Scooty-Puff Sr to drop by San Jose BMW to schedule an oil change for Scooty and pick up some new fuel line for Orthrus. Things go well and I get that half of things done. I have lunch, and then decide to skip the second trip of the day to pick up some carb cleaner (since I'm fresh out), and put that off until Sunday. Instead I spent some time replanting some yarrow that the squirrels had destroyed.

Sunday rolls around and I roll out in the PedoVan. I was going to stop off at AutoZone or something to get some carb cleaner and a fresh can of brake cleaner, but I noticed that it was available at Home Despot, so I combined two stops into one and picked up the cleaner along with some grass fertilizer, grass seed, perimeter insecticide, and some misc stuff like satin white interior paint and some fresh brushes (I'm progressing well with amassing my collection of every single variety of white paint).

The grass in the back yard was looking a bit thin after the grubs chewed up the roots last fall, so I did some overseeding and spread some fertilizer. I might take a second pass at overseeding though, as the spreader I was using was getting a bit clogged up on the large grass seeds and not really depositing at the rate I was expecting.

I haven't had any problems with insects or termites in the house, but the perimeter insecticide is pretty cheap and supposedly lasts for a whole year, so I figured I'd give it a try. It even comes with a little battery powered sprayer wand, which was... mildly effective. I made sure to take the batteries out when I was done, though, as I'm sure they would have exploded and leaked all over the inside of the spray wand had I left them in there in anticipation of doing another application next year with the remaining half of the insecticide.

In all I didn't get as much done this weekend as I might have intended, but it was still productive and fulfilling.