It’s neither my birthday nor Christmas, but I got another present from the previous owners of my farm today.  I’ve been cleaning up debris and non-functional fence since I moved here, and recently removed the last major section of broken fence.  I was pretty certain that we had removed all the random scraps of metal in that area of pasture, but when I tried to mow it today (with the brand-new flail mower), I found one more piece of discarded wire fence buried in the grass.  Here’s the view from underneath after I’d started cutting some of it away:

The process of cutting out the woven wire fence that was wrapped around the cutting head of the mower — snip, snip, snip, with no appreciable progress for the longest time — felt surprisingly similar to removing an infinite number of porcupine quills from a dog’s face, though I assume the mower didn’t feel any pain.  Eventually I started to make some progress,

and finally got it all cleared:

And here’s my gift, after unwrapping: