The Boy scouts, Girl scouts, and some church kids wanting to raise money
Seriously. Forget a leaf blower, just find yourself a Boy Scout and a rake. Alternatively, have children. Mom says that's why she had me.
We let him look up the word "enema" - he understood
In my house, to this very day, the exact threat is the dreaded "icewater enema." Mom is a nurse, so she knows how to do it, and she's evil (how else could she have me?), so she
will do it. I haven't been stupid enough to test her on that one.
If you go with the leafblower idea, do try very hard to respect your neighbors. Leafblowers make an unbelieveable racket that just drives me bonkers. The lawn guys who do the campus like to mow, edge, and blow the area right under my window for about four hours every Thursday evening, which makes it real hard to study. Never mess with one of those things in the late evening, and try to only use it on a weekend.
As for my specific recommendation... Do they still make yard vacuums? I had a Sears dual-purpose jobbie that had two different attachments. One went onto the exhaust of the turbine for blowing, and the other went onto the intake of the turbine for vacuuming. There was a bag with a shoulder strap that attached to the exhaust when you were vacuuming. It was light enough that I could wrangle it when I was 10-ish, and it sucked up and diced those little spikey ball things that fell off our sweet gum tree with no problem. It was really handy because our municipality banned the spreading of lawn debris onto city property (sidewalk and street), so I could just suck up all the leaves in a few minutes and dump them on the compost pile.
