Sorry 'bout that.
It's just that when the weather warms up and the wind dies down in our desert community, an inner switch gets flipped on and I spring into activity...planting seeds, getting garden plots ready, prettying up my
And I totally love that...but alas, it leaves me little time to blog.
Not that I don't still take pictures of everything as is my usual M.O. (What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't at least do that much, lol?)
In fact, I have several posts in draft that will show what I've been up to, but I'm waiting until everything is complete so I can show the before and afters.
Naturally, doing all of this has involved a few trips to those cavernous home improvement stores.
Because having been renters until just last October, aside from the flower pots I've used at the previous two houses we are pretty much starting from scratch where things like soil amending and supplies for our home-reno projects are concerned.
When I go into places like L*wes and H*me Dep*t, I usually stand there a tad overwhelmed by a store so big that birds make their nests inside in the rafters.
And where calling out to my children who run ahead of me down the aisles sounds a little like this: "Jericho...cho...cho...".
Aside from the obvious basics like where the garden, paint and lumber departments are, there are a lot of odd little idiosyncrasies about these stores that I just don't 'get' even after numerous trips through them (like clotheslines mixed into the same aisle as storage tubs, ironing boards and shelving. Who thought that was a good idea?? They're something you'd find outside, for pity's sake!) I don't 'get' why my husband could spend hours in there.
In the same way he doesn't 'get' the lure of places like JoAnn Fabric and Michaels for me. If I asked him to go find chenille pipe cleaners or fat quarters of fabric in one of those places, there's no telling what he'd come home with. (It was the same story when I was recently asked to find a cloth tool bag for him.)
Anyway, my list the other day included:
*clothesline t-bars
*silver colored corner brackets (for a project I'll be highlighting in an upcoming post)
*those sharp wiggly little things that you hammer into two adjoining pieces of wood to reinforce the corners...
*spray paint in three colors
*dowels
*a well-built garden nozzle to attach to the end of my hose which will allow me to mist delicate seedlings or saturate a fruit tree with the flip of a switch. Not gun shaped or cheap plastic.
*1x2x10's (4)
I guess the thing I dislike about these stores is that I just feel so...lost in them.
While it is one-stop-shopping (always a plus when you've got a toddler or three in carseats and don't relish the buckling and unbuckling them and loading and unloading them to make 10 different stops to get a few items), they've lost the one-on-one, 30-years-worth-of-hardware-knowledge and friendly customer service that their smaller competitors of yesteryear had.
Some friendly old guy behind the counter who you could explain your problem to, and he'd set you up with just what you need and might even explain how to install it in women's clear and concise terms that will help you to make the needed installation or repair on your own.
I really miss that, because after walking 20 miles pushing an unwieldy cart with 10 foot long lumber and a fussy toddler in it, I finally found an employee to help me find some corner brackets, and it ends up being some still-in-high school pretty-young-thang-with-glamour-length-acrylic-nails that didn't even know what a corner bracket was, and wasted about five minutes of my time before saying rather weakly, "I'm pretty sure we're out of them, because, like, this is where they usually are."
Later, I thought I'd try again, and ended up three sections down in the same aisle, where in desperation I asked another customer (an old guy), and he said, "Oh, those are right there" and pointed to where I could find them. Sure enough...there was a ginormous bin full of them.
Ahem.
Anyway, after laboriously finally locating everything and getting my cardio workout for the day, I had everything on my list except the garden nozzle thingie. So I asked an older woman that worked there where to find that, and she said, "Oh, those would be in seasonal." (Once again, I would have thought they would be located out in the nursery, by the plants needing watering, but who am I to organize these bastions of masculinity? **inserts Tim the Toolman Taylor grunt here**?)
I noticed something that day in L*wes.
There are a LOT of tools out there that are gun-shaped, with triggers.
Not to mention staple guns, industrial hot glue guns, and all the power tools and things that can be attached to an air compressor.
Which explains why I can never find these things at home in the place I last put them, thanks to a couple of very imaginative boys living under my roof that love anything and everything that they can pretend is a gun.
But behold, after a long sojourn through the cavernous depths of that store...I found it.
My precious.
It's heavy (which is supposed to indicate good solid construction, according to my Make it Last book), and it has every feature and then some which I wanted for my garden watering purposes.
Plus, it's flashlight-shaped instead of gun-shaped!
I promptly brought it home, installed it on the end of my favorite hose, and told the boys, "This nozzle is MINE. Do not touch it without asking, and keep it in the shade on the porch so that it won't be destroyed by the summer sun and so that I can find it whenever I need it.
My instructions went unheeded. Apparently flashlight-shaped (or maybe it was all the bells and whistles?) are the next best thing to gun-shaped.
*sigh*
I guess I should look at the silver lining in this...now Jericho begs to go water all the plants outside...front yard and back!
Now if we could just work on conserving water in the process...
**Edited to add**
In the writing of this post, I highlighted and was playfully bemoaning the general lack of help that folks tend to get in these large box stores in comparison to the small corner hardware stores...particularly from the younger employees who do not have several years worth of home repairs/DIY projects/woodworking/gardening experience under their belts to make them especially helpful to store customers.
What I failed to think about was how this post might be perceived by my mom...who happens to be a very hardworking master gardener employed in the garden center of one of these box stores. **"Doh!"**
My mom is on her feet for hours every day, lifting heavy bags of soil and other garden-related supplies, not to mention tending to the vast numbers of plants with varying needs that come and go at the store.
My mom is hard-working, really knows her stuff, and is the go-to person in her department when the store manager has a department-related question. She also spends a considerable amount of time answering customer questions out of her vast wealth of master-gardener knowledge, bending over backwards to make sure they get the help they're looking for, all with top-notch customer service and a smile.
In fact, her store was actually awarded recently for having the highest sales nationwide in their garden center, which I have no doubt was in large part due to her hard work there.
Sorry mom! Your store and the customers there are fortunate to have you...I only wish you and your store weren't 1,500 miles away!
