Joelle and I have been pretty lazy about cleaning up leaves that had fallen on our front lawn this past fall. To be fair: there’s a couple of reasons for this:

1. Seattle’s been very rainy this fall/winter, and who wants to rake in the rain?
2. I hate raking!

As yesterday turned into a gorgeous day outside (50 and sunny), we decided it was finally time to tackle the challenge.

So I pulled out the rake:

But then quickly realized, I still hate raking! Especially with the piles of wet leaves, this seemed like an impossible task, and I felt liking I was digging up the grass in the yard with each rake-stroke.

But, as a technologist ought to, I decided there has to be a better solution - so decided to make a quick trip to Home Depot and purchase a new Toro Super Blower/Vac. Highly, highly recommended. Not only did it do a much better job than the manual work. Actually made us want to finish cleaning up all of the leaves.

A couple of nice points:

1. The blower was powerful enough to disrupt all of the piles of wet leaves and move them around.
2. The vacuum swooped it up nice and easy.
3. A nice neighbor lady stopped by to ask how well it was working; she was thinking of getting one. Anything that gets neighbors talking is a plus in my book.

And perhaps, even more importantly, it’s fun to use :)

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