I just had to relate this little piece, a snippet, one of 100’s of incidents, of Thor’s accident prone life. There will be other log entries on this subject.
Thor lives in the country in a three bedroom home, huge front, side and back yard, each acres in size, mucho amounts of grass to cut, acreage. It is a pretty place, a quiet country setting, surrounded by woods on two sides with some great, tall hardwoods in the front, side and backyard. He also owns the woods at the rear of the back yard, where he hunts and fishes.
Thor has a garden tractor that is one size up from a VW bug – lots of power, a 60” mowing deck with the usual 
rotating, horizontal, high-speed, 3 blade mulching setup. The tractor is hefty enough, a powerful piece of lawn equipment.
Thor is a big camper. He uses his pickup truck to haul all the camping equipment. His truck has a flexible, vinyl, button down cover which he normally doesn’t remove as it is a pain in the ass to fasten back down, depending on the outside temperature as it affects the flexibility of the vinyl. So, to retrieve camping gear from the bed of the pickup, from underneath the bed cover, he uses ropes fastened to various camping items like tents, poles, traps, and coolers. These things have a tendency to slide to the front of the truck bed in route to the campground. So upon arrival, absent the use of the ropes, Thor has to crawl under the bed cover to unload the gear. Using his rope “system” he just pulls the stuff to the back of the bed for easy unloading.
So, Thor returns home from camping, unloads the equipment from the truck bed, using his rope system, returning tents, coolers, chairs, etc., to storage areas, mostly the garage or basement.
The garage is detached, with a concrete walkway running parallel to the garage and continuing to the kitchen door in the rear of the house. After emptying his Igloo cooler, he places it beside the garage to drain and air-out.
A couple of days later Thor is on the tractor, cutting the acreage of grass. He’s cutting along the side of the garage, parallel to the garage sidewalk. The camping cooler is yet leaning against the garage, with the rope, attached to the cooler handle. He sees the rope on the sidewalk leading from the cooler handle, but does not see the reminder of the rope which continues, secretly, into the high grass. He is cutting along, passes near the cooler, when he finally notices the rope in the grass, in the mower’s cutting path. His eyes wide open, jaw as well, as the mower deck passed over the Igloo’s rope.
The blade spindles under the deck picked up the rope, instantly consuming it. The cooler left its resting place, rocketing toward Thor on the Garden Tractor, colliding with the mower deck, missing Thor by not so much, with the momentum launching Thor’s cooler off the deck, into the air and across the yard.
Badly shaken, Thor turned off the tractor’s ignition and headed for a beer and the whiskey bottle in the garage frig.
***** S&E *****
Success & Excess 