The Saturn does not need more "BAM!"

So Friday night, Chris stayed late in Elgin to hang with her knitting crew, and I went out to Open Mike and Karaoke. So, I'm walking home at 1am and I see Chris's car parked in the street, which is *really* unusual. I guess I had left my car in the driveway and she wasn't up for the car swap it would take to get her car into the garage.

Now, normally this is not a problem, but occasionally, on weekends when the weather is good the youth of Belvidere take advantage of unattended vehicles. I say "occasionally" because since we've lived at this house I've had stuff done to my car a handful of times. Getting my mirror whacked off was probably the most serious, but that happened to every car on the street that night, and clearly nothing personal. Some might say once is too much, but for me it's not so much the damage that bothers me, it's more just the feeling of being violated.

So, knowing that it's a nice spring evening and it's not a school night, I approach the Saturn trying to get the glare from the street light at the right angle to see if there's been any damage. I see a big clear splatter mark across the windshield which, if I hadn't gotten the car washed 3 days ago, I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but now this requires more investigation. I continue walking toward the car and I see that there is little bits of something on the ground, but they're not reflecting so it's not glass, which is a bonus.

Care to guess what I found sticking to the hood and windshield wipers of my wife's car? If you guessed "olives" you'd be half right. Yeah... someone threw olives and maraschino cherries at my car. Cherries? Olives? If you can't make a good martini, don't take it out on me. Seriously who, pray tell, decides at midnight that they are going to drive around and garnish the neighborhood?

And this isn't the first time this has happened. Okay, okay, technically last time my car was condiment'ed with catchup but you get the idea. I don't know if the "traditional" vehicle vandalism foods are too expensive now or what, but it's just really weird. What's also weird is that they they didn't just whip the bottle of olives at the car (i.e. I didn't find a chip in the glass, or the container in the lawn) but they did egg the side mirror. ??? As if to say, "It's just a prank, but not really." I really don't mind the "sticky until you wash it off" stuff, but eggs can do real damage. Maybe kids just don't get the difference yet. I know I didn't until I had to clean it up and then realized a couple months later that I had missed some places where the paint had been eaten through.

Kids these days... pfft, whatever. Just stay off my lawn or I'll shake my fist at you.

Bob Strikes Back! (Hoser...)

I've talked about Bob, the World's cheapest man and the previous owner of our house, before. Well, for the past year, I've been watching various hose carriers and reels decay and fall off our house. All I could think was, "We can put a man on the moon, why is it so difficult to keep a hose tidy?" I believe the answer lies in how much one invests in equipment. For NASA that means, "As much as is necessary," while for Bob it means, "As close to zero as possible." Big difference.

(Note how the spigot is actually holding more hose than the caddy at this point...)

So I'm at K-Mart the other day and I remembered that the south side hose caddy is literally on it's last leg. I trudge off to the lawn and garden section, just to kind of get an idea for how much a replacement part is going to cost me and I see that there are about 15 different devices for storing your hose. Finally I find the one that's $3.89 that looks similar to the one that's clinging to my house by it's fingernails. It seems to meet all of Bob's criteria: It's an off brand, has absolutely no frills, and it's the cheapest one... at K-Mart! I get back home and find that my current hose "organizer" is exactly the same brand, no surprise there.

I go back to K-Mart and buy two of them. Why? Because to Bob's credit this particular hose carrier has five mount points, four of which line up perfectly around a brick. So since I got the exact same model, I don't have to drill more holes into my house. And I won't have to the next time it falls off either. Home improvement using the Bob method. Ta-Dah!