[freya]

I am just like so griped about this.

My partner is working 2 jobs this summer, so I have been mowing the lawn.

I hate mowing the lawn.....Actually, I hate most yard work because it is dirty and buggy and just generally "yucky," but I am doing this because I am not a totally unreasonable person and because my mom (who lives with me) maintains an amazingly beautiful garden (one of those gardems that people walking down the street will sometimes ring the bell and ask permission to go back in the yard and see) and so it only seems right that the yard in general not look so unkempt that it detracts from the garden.

So anyways, last week I was meeting with this client of mine, who is a single retired butch who lives in a little house on a pretty big piece of property about 20 miles east of the city, and somehow the subject of mowing the lawn came up. She, of course, has a riding mower and she enjoys mowing, but even so, it takes her half a day to get her lawn mowed. Well, I guess I said something about how much I hated having to do it, because she said that she especially liked, when she was all done, seeing the nice, neat rows of tracks in the grass from the mower.

......and I, apparently stupidly, said: "Well, actually, I don't mow back and forth in rows; I go around and around in ever-smaller rectangles until I get to the center."

And then she laughs and says: "You're such a girl!"

....which, of course, is true....DUH!!!!......but I really had no idea that there was a "girly" way of mowing (other, of course, than refusing to do it, which would definitely be my first choice!). But anyway, this AM I had to mow, and I decided to try to do it in rows, but everytime my attention wandered I'd come back to realize that I was doing it around and around again...so I guess it does seem to be the natural way for me to do it.

And then I made the mistake of saying something to my partner about this when she called at lunch and got the same kind of "Ha! Ha! that's a fu-fu (and therefore wrong) way to do it" response....so now I'm really ticked and feel like telling her if she wants to be that way, then she can d*mn well get out of bed on Saturday morning and do it herself after working 65-70 hours a week.

I mean, for heavens sake, the grass ends up cut either way -- and that was the point, I thought.

This kind of cr*p is just so friggin' misogynistic!

freya