The Leesburg Chainsaw Massacre

My intended victims. Clearly they were asking for it even more than your standard sex-crazed teens who stumble across a family of inbred cannibals.


After the slaughter.


My victims didn't have skin that I could slice off and stitch together to make a mask, but they did leave me with these trophies.

Getting Things Done

It took several hours, and it feels like more of an accomplishment than it really ought to, but I’ve finally managed to sit through all of the recorded TV that had piled up on my DVR.
Who says I don’t get things done?
Seriously, I want to know who’s been spreading these lies about me.
Yesterday found me out in the world earlier than usual, as I was off to a Green Home Buying Seminar for the NOVA Green Team.
The seminar was held next door to the comic shop, so after it was over I popped in to pick up this week’s comics.
Being the first Saturday in May, that meant it was Free Comic Book Day. Everyone was allowed to take five comics from the available freebies. There wasn’t much there that interested me, so I grabbed one comic for myself – the “zero” issue of Blackest Night, the latest “event” being published by DC – one that I thought Scott might be interested, and three kids comics for Scott’s girls.
After that I didn’t really have time to do my grocery shopping, as I was meeting Scott and Stacy at 1:30 to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
I don’t really have a lot to say about the movie. I liked it, for the most part, despite the presence of Gambit, who may very well be my least favorite comic book character ever. God, I hate him so very, very much.
I know a lot of people didn’t like the handling of Deadpool in the movie, but he’s never been a character that I cared about one way or the other, so while I could see that perspective, I didn’t share it.
But yeah, it was pretty good. Nothing spectacular, and while nowhere near the level of the really good comic book movies of the past few years, it was well above the level of the worst (which are themselves largely better than the comic book movies of the more distant past).
I’d probably rank it somewhere around X-Men 2, which is fitting, given how much it ties in with that movie.
After that it was off to Manassas, as I’d agreed to bring my chainsaw down to help trim a large tree in front of Scott and Stacy’s house. We were also going to watch the Riff Trax version of Twilight, which Scott and I had originally planned to watch this past Wednesday, but hadn’t, as Stacy had expressed an interest in seeing it.
After a trip to Costco to pick up a ladder and some food, and then eating some of the food, we got to work on trimming the branches. The end result of the trimming looked, to put it charitably, like crap, so ultimately the decision was made to remove it entirely.
Unfortunately by that time we’d pretty well run down the chainsaw’s battery, so it wasn’t up to the task of cutting it down, and, while I’d thought about doing so, I hadn’t brought a spare battery or the charger along.
By that time we decided to call it a day it was fairly late, and, covered with pine needles, I was feeling grungy, tired, and I-just-want-to-go-home-y, I decided that we’ll hold Riff Trax night at their house this Wednesday and I’ll bring along a spare battery and the charger and we’ll finish what we started.
Seriously, at least some times I do get things done, even if it takes an extra few days. Who is this vicious rumor-monger perpetrating these falsehoods?
In any case, I went out and did my grocery shopping this morning, and also stopped at Home Depot to pick up a regular supply line for my toilet and installed it when I got home, so now I’m done with that flood stop nonsense.
And that pretty much brings us up to date.

The Virginia Chainsaw Massacre

Oh my god, Jon has a chainsaw! Everybody run!

Or, you know, not.
As much as it annoys me when people make “serial killer” comments about me, alluding to the fact that I’m kind of weird, angry, quiet, and keep to myself, there are times when it’s difficult to avoid making snide comments about it myself.
Like when I buy a chainsaw.
But yeah, the “serial killer comments really do annoy me. Not all angry, quiet, weirdo loners are vicious murdering sociopaths, after all. Hearing those comments makes me so angry that I find myself wanting to methodically hunt down the people who make them, kill them, eat their hearts, skin them, and hang their skulls on my wall.
Kidding!
(Okay, so maybe I do bear some responsibility for perpetuating the serial killer image.)
In any case, yesterday when I got home from work I decided that I should take advantage of the break from the rain and mow the lawn.
I didn’t have quite enough energy to do the whole lawn, so I just did the back yard, as it gets a lot more sunlight than the front and side do and thus tends to grow more rapidly.
Before mowing, though, I figured I should do some hedge trimming so that I could use the mower to mulch up the trimmings.
There are two tree/hedge things growing in front of my fence on either side of the gate, and their branches have grown through the openings in the fence, and that kind of annoys me, as it just looks stupid. Last year I trimmed them as much as I could, but some of the branches were too thick for the trimmer to cut through.
Hence the chainsaw.
I’d seen the chainsaw last year and thought about buying it, as it uses the same interchangeable battery as the rest of my lawn equipment, but had never gotten around to it. So this morning I headed to Lowe’s, as it was the only place I knew that sold the chainsaw, and finally picked one up.
About a week after I bought my corded electric mower last year I saw an ad for a cordless, battery-powered version, which elicited a predictable response from me (which is to say that I loudly proclaimed “Fuck!” at the TV).
Mostly out of curiosity I kind of looked around to see if any place sold the mower, but didn’t find it anywhere.
Lately I’ve been seeing ads for some other battery-powered mower that looked interesting (Free edging attachment!), but it was one of those annoying “Call now to receive our informational DVD” things.
Thinking, “I’m not ordering a damn DVD,” I decided to check out the Web site, assuming that in the 21st Century any sensible company would put the appropriate information on its site.
Nope. The site is nothing but an order form for the DVD.
Listen, Neuton; fuck you and your DVD, all right?
Anyway, the point is that while I was at Lowe’s I saw the battery-powered version of my mower and found myself sorely tempted.
After all, the awkward shape of my property makes dealing with the extension cord plugged into my mower a huge pain in the ass, and the cord is the primary reason I put off mowing as much as I do.
I didn’t buy it, simply because there’s no way it would have fit in my car. I suppose that if I do decide to buy it I’ll have to shanghai Scott and his minivan, though Home Depot does rent out trucks for $19 for the first 76 minutes, which would be plenty of time to pick up the mower, drop it off at home, and bring the truck back, and the irony of renting a truck from Home Depot in order to buy something from Lowe’s would be rather entertaining.
Of course, the other problem is the question of what to do with my old mower. I mean, I just dropped a couple of hundred bucks on it less than a year ago. I suppose I could try selling it on Craigslist or something, but that seems like too much effort.
(Yes, that’s right; posting an ad on Craigslist is too much effort.)
That laziness (and generosity of spirit, of course, because I’m such a swell guy) is why I usually prefer to just give things away when I don’t need them anymore.
So...anyone need an electric mower? One may become available soon.
Anyway, after I got home I assembled the chainsaw and made short work of those recalcitrant branches, and, as I sliced my way through them I thought, “This is freakin’ cool!”
So, finding that now that I was a man with a chainsaw every problem looked like a tree branch, I scanned the yard for other things I could cut.
I ended up cutting down this little tree/hedge in front of the house that seemed to be struggling to live. For some reason most of its branches seemed to be broken and dead. It’s actually kind of weird; the branches seem to just randomly break, as if they’re too weak to support themselves (or some punk kids are coming along and snapping them in an act of petty and retarded vandalism).
So I decided to put it out of its misery.
There was another small hedge kind of hidden behind the hedges next to my door that never seems to grow anything, as it gets very little sunlight, so that got axe chainsaw as well.
Not sure what I’m going to do with the empty space where it used to be, though, as it now looks kind of weird (though better than it did with the dead bundle of branches). There doesn’t seem to be much point in planting anything else there, as it will probably die as well.
There’s still a little pointless tree in the back yard that I want to get rid of, but I figured that I had to stop with the chainsaw and get to mowing the rest of the lawn, so I didn’t get to it.
And that was pretty much my day.