Three Hundred Feet, MacGyver Edition

What do you do if you’ve spontaneously—some might say rashly—purchased ALL THE THINGS necessary to put in a “do-it-yourself” home irrigation system for your flowerbeds, and then realized half way thru that the “doing it yourself” part requires more grip-and-shove strength than you possess?

I believe I have already established that I am puny when it comes to upper body strength. Not puny enough that you should worry about me in the event of a zombie apocalypse---trust me, I’m strong enough to fight zombies—but puny enough that people often feel obliged to come lift heavy things for me. Who knew I was too puny to shove one little double-ended joiner thingy into a tiny little ¼” line thingy, far enough so that it wouldn’t leak? IT DID NOT LOOK THAT DIFFICULT WHEN I SAW IT DONE.

It’s often been said—and one more than one occasion it’s been said TO me---that you give the laziest person the hardest job and they will find the easiest way to do it. One could argue—and on more than one occasion I HAVE—that the lazy person in question is actually a SMART person for figuring out how to simplify the problem at hand. My problem currently was that the ¼” plastic water line was tougher than I was. I needed to soften it up...Cue hot pink embossing gun.

For those of you that didn’t spend the better part of this millennium crafting I’ll just explain an embossing gun this way: it works exactly like a heat tool/paint stripper, but it’s marketed to crafters—mostly women—comes in hot pink, and probably costs more than your gray, old, boring Black & Decker one. I figured out that a three second blast with my hot pink embossing gun would warm up the ¼” line enough that that joiner thingies would slip right in.

Alas, most of my flowerbeds are not located near my craft room.

Thankfully, my garage is full of 100 ft lengths of heavy-duty orange extension cord. Best of all, the hot pink and the orange looked really good together. Now if you’d just fill the trenches in for me, you could call me Tom Sawyer-MacGyver, and we could call this project D-O-N-E.