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| Illustrated picture of a bunny in a garden. |
G’day everyone,
What began as a goal to plant 5 gardenia bushes soon became a murder scene ... of sorts.
I don’t let blindness get in my way. Predictably, it often does anyway. This gardening project was one of these occasions.
I’ve used tillers for decades, plowing through tracts of Tennessee’s harder-than-concrete clay. Construction companies strip off and sell the topsoil when building homes here, and the remaining gravel-and-clay debris is what we homeowners are left with as yards. Instead of breaking my back & a shovel handle, I rented a tiller to crunch up the junk soil. Mixing in compost and soil conditioner usually produces a decent flower bed or garden base.
My goal was to turn a 15-foot x 3-foot plot of wasteland into a rich bed for gardenia bushes. Facing sunny south, in between two Antebellum-style front-porch pillars, the setting was perfect. I envisioned how my neatly manicured row of mature gardenia bushes would look in a few years, and I smiled warmly.
With that, I started the tiller and began the challenging task of hacking the clay into useable bits. The tiller performed as expected. If you’re visually impaired and using a tiller, you listen for good and bad sounds. When the tiller’s rotating tines clang against the brick facing or concrete sidewalk’s edge, they make a distinctive grinding sound of tortured metal.
Most tillers are basic, virtually indestructible machines that will eventually break up even the hardest clays.
Experience taught me to hold on for dear life after pulling the starter’s rip-cord. The ground was so hard that the tiller’s spinning tines caused the machine to bounce and thrash around. Keeping the tiller on track and moving forward reminded me of my struggle to reel in a monster swordfish while deep-sea fishing (a nod to Ernest Hemingway). In my case, I used the tiller like a jackhammer - breaking up a lump of clay before guiding it forward. This is when it was critical to listen for those cracking and tine-pinging sounds.
At the moment I realized I was halfway done, the tiller came upon an extremely dense patch of clay. No matter the direction or amount of effort, I couldn’t break up this stretch of clay.
Then, the tiller coughed up a small black box. Excited that I might have dug up a hidden treasure, I cut off the tiller’s power and reached for the aged and battered box. I frowned upon realizing that I uncovered a piece of junk that was probably discarded during our home’s construction. The thing was a beaten up AC/DC power converter. Gone was my hope of discovering our fortune. I was surprised that the thing didn’t make a racket as the tiller crunched into it.
Guess what also didn’t make noises while being tilled - an extension cord didn’t. This power cord leads to our inflatable Easter display further out in the yard.
Yep, our Easter bunny, pushing his wheelbarrow of colored eggs, was fully deflated and lying in a heap in the yard. It was then, and only then, that I realized my blunder.
I spent the next 45 minutes unsnarling strands and bits of a heavy-duty extension cord from beneath my rented tiller. Praying I hadn’t destroyed the rattly hunk of junk, I was relieved that the tiller sputtered to life and continued working correctly. I marveled at how well it returned to breaking up wads of clay once a mauled extension cord is removed from between its jaws.
No point in getting mad as nonsense like this often happens during my projects. I’m not absentminded; rather, my brain fills in gaps in my visual field. Unless I proactively think through the details of a project, it becomes easy to overlook/not anticipate an extension cord in the path ahead. Similarly, my brain paints a picture where the extension cord lies behind and out of the work area. It's a maddening overcompensation for the lack of information supplied by my short-circuited eyesight.
The project continued without further incident, and we now have 5 growing gardenia bushes. They’re beautiful, and the memory of my rather-predictable goof was already vanishing, with the exception of one thing.
Our dead inflatable Easter bunny was a crumpled mess.
It’s often normal for the scope of a project to grow as a result of unknown and unforeseeable stuff. My inadequate eyesight is a factor that most often generates additional projects for me, such as repairing our inflatable, which brings me to project 2.
Thankfully, the actual inflatable and fan motor remained intact. Its AC/DC converter and most of its electrical line were shredded. Several attempts later at ingenious solutions proved fruitless, I grabbed our Halloween inflatable cat out of a packed Halloween box. I clipped the cat’s power cord halfway down and stripped the insulation back to expose wire coming from the cat, the Easter Bunny, and the ACDC power converter.
A nice advantage of working with DC power is that if I hook the sets of wires together incorrectly, simply the inflating fan won’t work. That happened to me, so the fix was to simply switch one wire for another, and the fan sputtered to life. The Easter Bunny inflated fully.
I repeated the same procedure with the Halloween cat, and all went well. Because these two inflatables would now share a power supply, to avoid future confusion when setting up for each holiday, I marked the line from the power converter, the cat, and the rabbit so that the correct strands of wire could be hooked together with them from the beginning. Sometimes I use black electrical tape, but this time, I just tied a simple knot into each matching strand.
Sure, my poor eyesight caused delays and an unnecessary second project, but as you see, it’s usually quite easy to repair most things. I’d rather spend my time repairing things than feeling it necessary to go to a store and replace it. I’m that cheap ... not really, I just like the challenge of fixing stuff.
That wraps up my gardening and electrical projects for the day. I’m drafting a post about my experience installing an electric -wire non-grounded fence — it was a shocking and hair-raising experience. Feel free to groan.
Have a nice day.
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