As if clearing out some of the junk piled up in the dead space down the side of the house wasn’t exciting enough this weekend, we then discovered a small wasps nest on the underside of our plastic outdoor storage unit.
It didn’t look active, but just to be on the safe side I put on a full radiation suit and removed it, before it became a bigger problem down the line.
I’m not good at dealing with problems in the here and now, either. Our kitchen tap has been screeching whenever we run another tap in the house for over a year. It’s not a big enough problem for a plumber to come out and sort it, and it’s not a small enough problem for me to sort it myself. Sometimes, I get a shot of adrenaline and burst into action, but as a chronic procrastinator the source of the adrenaline is almost always an impending sense of doom (or an immovable deadline, which is often the same thing).
I wasn’t sure how long the nest had been there. I’d opened and closed the lid of that storage unit more times than usual in recent weeks while tidying around the garden, and it hadn’t caught my eye before now. It was pretty obvious. But I also hadn’t noticed any wasps flying around. It was either in its infancy, as Google Gemini suggested, or it was years old and abandoned, and I’d just not noticed it (which is also a strong possibility).
In among the rest of the junk I found a small barbecue that we used once about two years ago.
We are the worst type of barbecue owners — or, just maybe, we are in fact excellent barbecue owners. Think of how many barbecues we haven’t had over the last two years because the one we owned was too dirty to use. Think of all that charcoal we haven’t burned.
Some of the charcoal actually had green shoots rising out of them. I can’t think of anything that’s been more neglected over the last two years. How can something be alive in there, yet I can’t keen a houseplant alive? That’s what all the cool kids are asking these days.
