He "thinks my tractor's sexy"

This tractor is about a billion, if not a zillion, years old.The lever that controls the gas has a picture of a rabbit next to it.

So, I just finished cutting the grass. Dan taught me how to drive his tractor (a.k.a. riding lawnmower). The tractor is his "baby" and he is completely anal about its well-being (not the one I'm sitting on in this picture; his baby is a different/fancier one).

Anyway, the tractor is not difficult to drive, it's actually kind of fun! However, the bugs right now are AWFUL (we've been getting a lot of rain, and it's muggy and hot, so bad combination). Dan only lets me cut the field behind our house ("the back field" -- it's about 5 acres), so it didn't matter that it takes a little bit to get the hang of how to drive straight. The gross part is he hadn't cut it in a while, so a lot of bugs + long grass = nasty. I mean, the bugs are mostly just crickets and grasshoppers, so completely harmless, but they jump up when the tractor is coming their way and inevitably land ON the driver. Yuck. I got a few bites, but nothing horrible until after I was done and Dan and I both started weeding the flowerbeds. THEN I got eaten alive. Thank goodness it started to rain so we could come inside.

Dan and I still haven't gone to test drive my Jetta, which is disappointing. We were supposed to go today because it was going to rain, but since it was dry we all ended up working outside. I almost got stuck helping paint "the garage" (it's actually an old carriage house that is now used as a garage; it's bigger than the house -- it could hold about 8 cars). Instead the garage has a ton of old farm machinery in it, up to and inluding a tractor that is older than I am "but still runs great." Thank goodness I got out of painting; apparently no one here believes in using a paint-sprayer, so they're doing it all by hand. And not even with rollers, which would have been bad enough, but with about a 3" handheld brush. Apparently it's a paint sin to use a sprayer (and Dan would know) because you have to thin down the paint to get it to go through the sprayer. And my question was: So? It didn't go over well.

I'm so itchy from these bug bites! I think I need to jump into a big vat of Corizone-10. We've figured out that I'm allergic to mosquito bites. Okay, it's self-diagnosed, of course, but I do swell up abnormally when I get bitten by a mosquito, so if the shoe fits. . . . Seriously, I swell up probably 5x more than a normal person. It's quite gross.