I had it set up under the downspout and came out to find a puddle spreading across the whole side yard. Anyone else have those blue plastic barrels split on them or did I just get a bad one?
Last December I was sitting on my porch trying to fix a string of outdoor lights before a party. I thought I could just pull the knots apart with my bare hands and be done in 5 minutes. Two hours later I was freezing, the lights were worse, and I had to ask my neighbor for help with a screwdriver. Has anyone else lost way too much time to a stupid ball of tangled wires?
I finally cut them down from 8 feet tall to 3 feet last Saturday and the difference was instant, now I'm wondering if anyone else has tried something simple like that to totally change how a space feels.
Honestly I still don't know how one week can be so bad and so good at the same time. It was mid July, like the 14th through the 19th, and my AC unit died on Monday when it hit 97 degrees outside. I called three repair places and the soonest they could come was Thursday. Then on Tuesday my dog got stung by a bee on his nose and it swelled up like a baseball. I spent $80 at the emergency vet just for them to say he'd be fine. But then Wednesday night I was sitting out on my porch in the dark sweating and this random guy walks by and gives me a working window unit he was throwing out. Said his neighbor moved and left it behind. I plugged it in and it cooled my whole living room in like 20 minutes. Thursday the AC guy shows up and says my unit just needed a $15 capacitor. So I ended up with two working ACs and my dog's nose went back to normal. Has anyone else had a week where the universe just throws random good and bad at you back to back like that?
I was dead set against putting up a bird feeder in my backyard in Austin... figured it would just bring rats and mess. My neighbor Karen finally talked me into it 3 months ago and now I've got cardinals and finches showing up every morning. The key was getting one with a tray to catch seeds and cleaning it once a week. Has anyone else found a feeder design that actually keeps the messy seeds contained?
He pointed at a box of old golf clubs I was about to haul to my place and said 'you don't even play golf, you just like the idea of it' and man that kinda stung because I do that with half my basement. Has anyone else had a relative call them out on something that made you rethink how you collect stuff?
Everyone talks about how simple it is to put up a bird feeder. Just screw it to a tree or a post, right? Wrong. I bought this nice metal hook one from a local hardware store in Portland last month. Thought I'd be done in 30 minutes tops. But my yard is all rocks and clay, so digging a hole for the post took forever. Then the hook bent under the weight of the seed bag. I had to run back to the store for a sturdier pole. Then the squirrels figured out how to climb it in 10 minutes flat. So I bought a baffle, but it was the wrong size. By the time I finally got the thing up and filled with seed, the sun was going down. Has anyone else had a simple outdoor project turn into an all day thing like this?
She caught me zoning out on the deck last weekend just watching the clouds float by. She asked what I was doing and I said thinking. Then she said that's just boring pretend for adults. Honestly that hit me harder than I expected. For a solid minute I couldn't come up with a good reason why I stopped making up stories about clouds looking like dragons or talking animals. Now every time I sit outside I try to actually imagine what that big fluffy cloud is supposed to be instead of just staring. Has anyone else had a kid say something that totally flipped your brain around like that?
I was out cleaning my gas grill last Saturday after a cookout and my neighbor Bob walked over and asked why I wasn't using a ball of aluminum foil instead. He said the wire bristles can break off and get in your food, which I never even thought about. Has anyone else switched to foil or am I the last person to figure this out?
I was out sitting in my chair watching clouds and my cheap webbed one snapped, so I just laid down on this mat I grabbed from the dollar bin at Target last spring. Has anyone else had a random purchase turn into an outdoor lifesaver?
I was just chilling in my lawn chair around 4 PM when this maybe 10 year old kid I barely know stopped and asked what I was looking at. I said clouds mostly. He squinted up and said that one looks like a broken ukulele, which honestly I had never thought of before. We talked for maybe 10 minutes about what each cloud looked like and he had way weirder ideas than me. Has anyone else had a random neighbor kid just walk up and say something that totally changed how you see something ordinary?