A few thoughts:

• Many landlords will insist on having a gardener included in the rental cost because they want the place maintained.
• If a gardener is not included, it’s expected that you keep things looking decent, but they might not even want you doing upgrades because it’s hard to be sure you’ll do them right.
• If I were renting a home, I’d look for one that isn’t going to take huge amounts of yard maintenance.
• Having chosen a place that seems reasonable for me to maintain, I’d try to stay on top of it because I like living in a place that looks nice, and it seems rude to my neighbors to let everything go to hell. A lot of folks also really enjoy taking care of a garden.

Horrible, horrible human being. Not going to cry.

Yeah, the meme is fine but OP got the wrong tree in the title. Should be the callery pear.

I can understand that. We had two dogs, three cats, and two birds - so that was harder to do.

How about linking to the NPR story instead of this weird website?

Tried Benadryl and it didn’t help. Didn’t want to do anything to strong, but maybe should have. Doesn’t matter any longer.

Every year for a dozen years our dog would get so traumatized by fireworks that you could literally hear her teeth chattering. We’d turn up loud music in the house, and make her a bed in a closet, but she’d still bolt out and look for anywhere where it was less noisy or safer (there wasn’t such a place, but we couldn’t convince her of that). She’d jump into the bathtub or claw her way into a different closet, only to bolt away to find a better spot at the next explosion. And neighbors would light off the occasional firework until like 2 or 3 in the morning. We couldn’t go off and leave her. I grew to really hate the 4th.

She died a couple months ago, so I guess that’s no longer a problem for us personally, but I know we aren’t the only ones with sensitive pets.

Yeah, pretty sure if you follow an overdrive link now it will take you to Libby.

I agree, it doesn’t look right

There are! Here’s mine.

I worked for 40 years at a place that mostly made rocket engines for NASA and the DOD; you probably wouldn’t be surprised at the number of people who had this one on their wall. Probably also wouldn’t be surprised at the number of family members who saw it and had to share it.

He was trying to explain how it is one time, and he showed me by drawing a picture of a galloping horse, but he didn’t sketch it out and then fill in the detail. He started at the nose and did it in full detail, left to right, like he was uncovering the drawing by lifting a sheet. It was really amazing.

Even more so, luck is a big component of success. You can have both skill and hard work and not be successful at something. Likewise, some of the people who are successful aren’t the most skilled, talented, or hardest working. There are correlations between success and those things, but luck is certainly a factor.

Peanut butter M&Ms are so completely addictive to me.

Lots of upvotes, but that’s simply not true. It is true that people can be gifted in one area and not in others, but those people can excel in those areas more than someone even more passionately interested could ever hope to.

I knew a guy named Joe Rohde. You can look him up, he ended up being a head of imagineering at Disney. When I knew him, he was a high school art teacher, and then just starting at Disney. His aptitude for art was off the charts, and his mom said that was true when he was four and able to draw 3D renderings when his peers couldn’t do stick figures. Sure, he practiced and developed skills, but his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate. He was absolute crap at math.

I spent 40 years at a company that mostly made rocket engines for NASA and the DoD, working with literal rocket scientists. I met all sorts of very smart people. Some were the stereotypical scientist that were geniuses in a particular area but had no skills outside of it, but others were just simply brilliant at anything they turned their mind to. Many of them defied the stereotype and also has great social skills.

It might be nice to think that anyone can be truly great at anything they put their mind to, but I’ve seen too many people who are truly great at things to believe it. Some people are just wired differently.

Edit: and none of the above mentions gender because gender doesn’t factor into it.

In the US, that would actually be illegal. They are required to show the actual food in food advertisements.

https://impressionsathome.com/truth-in-advertising-real-foods-vs-fake-foods/

Here’s the full version on YouTube.

Oh, they’re SO painful. Really unnecessarily nasty.

They’re fun to watch because they often grab caterpillars from plants and take them away or eat them nearby. Great for gardens.

Ugh, sounds awful, but glad you found a solution. I don’t remember what I put down the hole they had at the base of a tree. Wasn’t dawn, I don’t think.