Category: Home and Garden

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Light Sensors

For years I have left the porch light on at night. I like to leave it on even after I’ve gone to bed. I think a light by the front door heps welcome unexpected visitors or people who need help, and it helps deter people who are up to no good. Criminals prefer to do their dirty work under cover of darkness and light is a good deterrent.

When I had to pay for some vinyl repairs to the siding that was damaged in a hail storm, the men who were working on the siding told me they were going to have to remove the exterior lights and that if I want to go buy new replacements for the old and rusty ones that they would install the new lights for me at no extra charge.

That seemed like a generous offer, so I went down to Home Depot and looked at light fixtures. I didn’t like anything I saw there, so I went to Lowe’s and found some nice ones. I bought new exterior adjustable floodlights and a new porch light with a built in motion detector.

The motion detector comes on when someone approaches the front door, so I don’t have to leave the light on all night long any longer. If someone needs to come to the door the sensor will turn the light on automatically. And if a criminal tries to use the darkness to hide a break in the light coming on will hopefully alarm him to the point that he leaves without bothering me.

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Change Your Clocks Tonight

clock

Helps to remember this little saying, Spring forward and Fall back. That means the clocks change tonight and since we have to move the time ahead by an hour that we all lose that hour of sleep. I always find it interesting that they decided to make the change happen on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Why not do it on Sunday night and have that lost hour disappear before Monday’s start of the week? I don’t think its fair to cut short my Saturday night partying by an hour when you could just as easily take away an hour from Sunday instead.

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Mud and More Mud

With all this rain we are getting I am pretty sure that this area won’t have any issues with drought later in the summer. We have had so much rain my yard is nothing but mud.

The mud is becoming a big problem for a lot of people. For one thing, we can’t till the gardens or fields. This is the week that most of us gardeners like to get out the tillers and turn the soil to get ready for planting. But it won’t turn if it is mud.

I saw on the news last night that a fire truck responding to a fire down in Nolensville got stuck in the mud. The house was burning on top of a hill and had a dirt driveway, which is pretty common for houses out in the country. So the firetruck tried to get up the hill to put out the fire and ended up getting stuck in the mud. The home burned to the ground because the driveway was blocked by that stuck fire truck. What a shame, but at least no lives were lost.

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Extra days are nice

Yesterday was like a bonus day. Usually February only has 28 days and once the schoolkids get that firmly implanted in their minds, they just accept that. Except that every four years February gets an extra day tacked on the end of the month. So that happens to be this year and it was kinda nice to have that extra day. It gave me a little breathing room to get some things done around the house and an extra day to get the bills paid.

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Too Many Remotes

One of the dogs lost his ball under the sofa, so I had to get up and move the furniture around in the living room to find his ball. That dog would give me no peace while his ball was unreachable.

When I moved the sofa, the cushion fell off and that’s when I decided to give up watching the TV and just clean up the living room and the sofa. I don’t usually worry too much about the sofa, but for some reason there was a lot of loose change and weird things accumulating under that sofa cushion, so I decided to deal with it on the spot.

By the time I was done, I had found over $4.00 in loose change, a Bic lighter, a pair of sunglasses, a AA battery, three white socks and four remote controls. I had no idea I needed four remote controls in my living room until I rounded them up and laid them out on the coffee table.