What did you do today non-detailing related?

We need rain. There have been fire warnings due to the windy dry conditions. I was out vacuuming up leaves around a large oak,.
 
Been spending a bit of time in my tree stand in the woods. Its archery season for Deer. Have seen a lot of bucks but nothing i want to shoot.
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Had the time so took it in for the PA state inspection. All good. Hard to believe it has been one year since I got it!
 
These shots were taken in mid-May 2025.........................





These were taken today, 6.5-months later.





The overall feature has lost some of its definition, but that will be rectified after the flowers have done their thing.

One of the situations I'd dread at the nursery was customers giving me an almost impossible task of recommending a plant that could give height but with little to no width. Almost always this plant was to go in a garden bed up a driveway, a situation created the homeowner or the building contractor creating a garden bed no more than 100 - 150mm wide. Then they want something to grow tall to cover the fence, but not any wider than the garden bed so as to not encroach on the driveway. Quite often an irrigation line wasn't run under the concrete either, and most customers wanted something "low maintenance" (read: I'm lazy).

So to recap, tall but not wide, combined with low water use and no need to prune because the customer didn't want to put in the effort. Said customer was almost always someone in their early 30's, usually coming off the back of having a house built, a situation where the options were virtually limitless. Then they'd come to me with this question and wonder why I couldn't give them 100 options to choose from.

The usual hedging shrubs would be ruled out because the lack of garden bed width and the requirement of low maintenance. Even some of the modern slim growing Lilly Pilly such as 'Straight & Narrow' would still require pruning to reduce width, you also need more of them because they don't necessarily fan out like a hedging shrub. Clumping Bamboo is an option, but too messy, so not actually low maintenance, and they require a lot of water, so not tolerant of a lack of irrigation. Tall pencil conifers get ruled out for the certain look they create and the fact they grow much taller and wider than people would expect. So, one by one, I would run out of things to show the customer, and suddenly that's my fault, not the idiot who created the problem in the first place.

Star Jasmine would always be my preference in this situation. It creates a lush, rich, dark green wall of foliage without being too wide. The only downside is needing some wires to be strung on the fence to get things started, either just horizontal lines, or in a pattern as above. Once again, this would get dismissed by most customers as installing those wires required effort. At which point, I would have loved to question why they are bothering, just concrete it and paint it green, job done! I guess they'd complain about having to pick up a paint brush too.

Top Tip - Unless you are realistic and create an appropriately sized garden bed, and/or are willing to put in the work, DO NOT bother with a driveway garden bed. It's much cleaner to just run concrete right up to the fence and call it good.
 
Mow the lawns and change the chook water next door neighbours have moved out for upto 6 month because a rat chewed through their water hose that connects to the fridge.

That was 3 years ago and they have only now noticed the cupboards all bent out of shape and the underfloor has black mould.

Whole kitchen will need replacing etc,etc I think it one big insurance scam by the builders.

Of course the insurance company is covering fuel and accommodation costs 🙄.

Even though I could be a typical neighbour and not mow or keep an eye on the place like 99% of people do, I go out of my way to help but they hardly notice sometimes and that shits me.
 
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Tasmania said:
Mow the lawns and change the chook water next door neighbours have moved out for upto 6 month because a rat chewed through their water hose that connects to the fridge.

That was 3 years ago and they have only now noticed the cupboards all bent out of shape and the underfloor has black mold.

Whole kitchen will need replacing etc,etc I think it one big insurance scam by the builders.

Of course the insurance company is covering fuel and accommodation costs 🙄.

Even though I could be a typical neighbour and not mow or keep an eye on the place like 99% of people do, I go out of my way to help but they hardly notice sometimes and that shits me.
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Quite often people notice what HASN'T been done rather than what HAS been done. So, I say stop doing this goodwill gesture for a while. That doesn't mean you are bad person, but it will make them reconsider their motives. For people like you who do things like this out of generosity, it can be hard to break that cycle and realize that the only one you are letting down is yourself by continuing to play along without appreciation. Ask me how I know this.
 
DFB said:
Quite often people notice what HASN'T been done rather than what HAS been done. So, I say stop doing this goodwill gesture for a while. That doesn't mean you are bad person, but it will make them reconsider their motives. For people like you who do things like this out of generosity, it can be hard to break that cycle and realize that the only one you are letting down is yourself by continuing to play along without appreciation. Ask me how I know this.
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Yeah I did do that last year i didn't mow their nature strip or go over to see them and all I go from them were "Are you ok"?

The front grew about half a metre before i said f**k it and mowed,
They're both retired Eva is into teaching European language

And Kurt sits inside all day drinking wine and playing on the phone,
His pretty lazy but we do have interest in common, firearms, knives

But keeping his property nice is the last thing on his mind.....😞
 
Tasmania said:
Yeah I did do that last year i didn't mow their nature strip or go over to see them and all I go from them were "Are you ok"?

The front grew about half a metre before i said f**k it and mowed,
They're both retired Eva is into teaching European language

And Kurt sits inside all day drinking wine and playing on the phone,
His pretty lazy but we do have interest in common, firearms, knives

But keeping his property nice is the last thing on his mind.....😞
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Some people are just different, the guy down at the corner house, where the Outlander hit the light pole a few weeks back still has a bunch of plastic shrapnel in the lawn on the nature strip from the accident. The grass is slow growing at the moment so he hasn't mowed it, but it's going to be messy when he does.
 


Finally got a PC built after getting it piece by piece over the course of a year, buying when the components were on sale.
I dont know how many of you are into that sorta stuff but here's the specs

NZXT H7 Flow RGB case
AMD Ryzen 9800X3D processor
Asrock Steel Legend 9070 XT graphics card
Asus Rog Strix x870-a motherboard
Teamforce Delta 32gb ram 6000mhz 30CL
Montech 360 AIO watercooling
Samsung 990 Pro 1tb hard drive
Razer Huntsman mini v3 keyboard
Razer Viper V3 Pro mouse
Artisan FX Zero ninja xsoft mousepad
Acer Predator 280hz monitor
 
PA DETAILER said:
Had the time so took it in for the PA state inspection. All good. Hard to believe it has been one year since I got it!
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i'm due next month. gotta pull off the rear wheels to see if those brakes are still good.
 
MisterSnoop said:
i'm due next month. gotta pull off the rear wheels to see if those brakes are still good.
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You guys in PA and NY have crazy inspections with that stuff. When I was a kid here in NJ it was legendary that PA wouldn't allow any rust perforation when we had cars driving around here where the whole rear quarter behind the rear wheels would be rusted away.

Anyway, even when we had safety inspections, they never looked at the brakes, they had a 4-wheel...um...I guess you would call it a dyno test rig, where they would get up to 5 or 10 mph and jam the brakes on, where each wheel was on it's own grid, and the force would register by driving fluid up a glass tube next to the driver's door where the inspector could see it. How well that worked, I don't know, but nobody was taking any wheels off (at that time we had no private inspection, only re-inspection after repair after failing at the state inspection station).

Today we have no safety inspection, they don't even check if your lights are working, all they check is if the catalytic converter is there and if the check engine light is on. We're a long way from when they used to check the brakes, lights, turn signals, horn, wipers, tread depth, front end tightness, gas filler neck, and tailpipe emissions.
 
Setec Astronomy said:
You guys in PA and NY have crazy inspections with that stuff. When I was a kid here in NJ it was legendary that PA wouldn't allow any rust perforation when we had cars driving around here where the whole rear quarter behind the rear wheels would be rusted away.

Anyway, even when we had safety inspections, they never looked at the brakes, they had a 4-wheel...um...I guess you would call it a dyno test rig, where they would get up to 5 or 10 mph and jam the brakes on, where each wheel was on it's own grid, and the force would register by driving fluid up a glass tube next to the driver's door where the inspector could see it. How well that worked, I don't know, but nobody was taking any wheels off (at that time we had no private inspection, only re-inspection after repair after failing at the state inspection station).

Today we have no safety inspection, they don't even check if your lights are working, all they check is if the catalytic converter is there and if the check engine light is on. We're a long way from when they used to check the brakes, lights, turn signals, horn, wipers, tread depth, front end tightness, gas filler neck, and tailpipe emissions.
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In New South Wales we have annual inspections, but only after the vehicle is 5 years old, it includes a brake test, they look for any major leaks, also lights, seat belts, and I think they do look for rust as well, I got rid of two of my cars because rust was going to fail them and they weren't worth fixing. I know in Queensland they don't do annual inspections, and I remember whenever I went there you'd see complete rust buckets still driving around. I'm not sure about Victoria or Tasmania.
 
Big Dave said:
In New South Wales we have annual inspections, but only after the vehicle is 5 years old, it includes a brake test, they look for any major leaks, also lights, seat belts, and I think they do look for rust as well, I got rid of two of my cars because rust was going to fail them and they weren't worth fixing. I know in Queensland they don't do annual inspections, and I remember whenever I went there you'd see complete rust buckets still driving around. I'm not sure about Victoria or Tasmania.
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No test here, You can literally have the worst of the worst and the police and road transport do SFA.
 
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