It's Not Easy Being Green: A Mission to Shrink my Carbon Footprint

When I was a single woman homeowner, I was fairly capable.  I could open jars, kill bugs, take out the garbage, mow the lawn.  Now that I am married, I am slightly ashamed to say that I've abandoned most of the above and slipped effortlessly into Traditional Gender Roles where all of those things are concerned.  However, I am not ashamed enough to actually volunteer to re-take any of those ongoing tasks again. (And my husband does do the vacuuming as well, and wherever cleaning is concerned I do most of the de-cluttering and the ongoing-keep-the-place-from-being-a-total-pit stuff, whereas he's much better at the "scrub it within an inch of its life" jobs.)

This post is specifically about the lawn-mowing stuff.  He, being a Guy and a Techno-geek, hated my old reel lawnmower because it was so much work to mow the lawn with it. He wanted to buy something easier.  And a gym membership. I was like, honey, wouldn't it make more sense to save the money and get your exercise mowing the lawn? (My credibility in the above was aided by the fact that I'd done exactly that for 2 years before marrying him, but strained by the reality that I don't any more.)

When we moved to our new home, with our nice big lawn, he kind of put his foot down. Okay, not really--he passive-aggressively allowed the reel mower to fall into incredible disrepair until it didn't work any more, and then he insisted we get a new one. (He's a good guy, really. I'm just annoyed.)  Where I put my foot down was that I didn't want us to get a gas mower. He agreed. And neither of us thought an electric with a cord was a good idea. So he (being Guy and Techno-geek) researched cordless electrics until he found the one he wanted.

So, the end result: