In Which I Take My New Yard Cart for a Spin!

My husband pointed it out to me in this week's Rural King circular: a Gorilla yard cart, capable of carrying 600 pounds, and with a dumping feature, for a pretty decent sale price. I kicked it around for a few days, and on Saturday, we went into town and we bought one! Well, we bought a BOX full of parts that could be assembled into a cart, but I digress. . . .

It wasn't quite as easy as all of that. We looked online first and their website said the Gorilla carts were out of stock. So my husband called the store, and got put on hold for 10 minutes. Nobody could answer his question of whether they had any. A bit later, I called back. Got the same lady. Told her we were the people on hold before. Asked her: did they have any of the sale yard carts?

Her manager told her they did, and the lady hemmed and hawed when I asked her to put my name on one and hold it up front. But when I got there an hour later, I walked straight up to the lady I'd spoken with, and before I even got done saying, "I'm the person who called about the Gorilla yard cart," she had the big box loaded onto my cart!

Oh, and it was one of those weird carts that you can't steer. I was pushing it. It was going in all kinds of directions. I was trying to head it off before I hurt somebody. The lady at the center register up front kindly straightened me out: "It's a PULL cart," she said; "Not a PUSH cart." Well, I did much better after that! "Do you need any help getting that stuff to your car?" three different people asked me. Um, no, I brought my husband along today. . . .

In minutes, I had paid for the cart, and I went over to get my free popcorn. My husband was just coming through the front door, and I informed him: "I've got the cart. It's already bought and paid for!"  Well, we'd been wagering on whether I'd actually get one, and the percentages of success had seemed low. But now they skyrocketed right off the page!

The Moose, who is now T. Tiger's under-study, took delivery of the big box on Saturday afternoon when we got home. The cart in its box spent the night by the front door, and on Sunday morning, first thing, we assembled it, under the direction of the Moose, and an assortment of other critters whom you may see.

Now, in separate, other news, I also hit one of the local plant sales. Patchwork Farms had a tent not far from Sam's Club, and while my husband had gone in to nab a rotisserie chicken and some other items at Sam's, I hit the plant sale.

I came home with a nice hanging planter of salvia (and didn't even have to go through a Hell-ride to get it!), and a couple of colors of osteospermum (also sometimes called Kalahari daisies; the purple ones are the flowers I carried on my wedding day). The flowers wanted to be in this picture and so they are!

On the yard cart, everything was pretty easy to put together, and my husband did the majority of the work with his ratchet set. I'd watched a short video online about how to assemble it before we started. Assembly took us about an hour.

The instructions were photographs only, and all hardware was separately provided in a little blister pack, from which you'd take each numbered step's items. We didn't read the directions until the very end, and noticed that it said the following:

4. Do not use this cart for transporting passengers.
5. This cart is not intended for highway use.
6. Do not exceed 5 mph.

So here is a picture of me getting ready to break all of those rules! I'll be zooming down the sidewalk! I'll be running people off the road! This sucker has no brakes, so you can bet your sweet bippy I'll be doing FAR more than 5 mph!!!  EAT MY DUST!!!!!

My soundtrack song is this one: the Beach Boys, with Fun, Fun, Fun.

P.S. I just wanted to add that the yard cart that I have, which I bought shortly after I bought the house, has been very heavily used and is on its last legs. Nobody tells you when you buy a house how much time you will spend transporting dead bodies, for example. (Sure, in the movies, it's all about the quicksand, etc. etc. But never do they tell you that life will be slinging dead creatures at you and that you yourself will be responsible for their removal! And trees too. I include dead trees in this category as well!) In any case, this is just ONE of the things your grade A number one yard cart is for: transporting all of the bodies!

P.P.S. My husband discovered two large white opossums in our yard one morning last week. I do not trust them. I suspect they will want to ride the yard cart all around the place!!! So we tucked the finished yard cart into the shed for safe keeping. They'll never find it there!