May 26, 2021 3 min read

Last week’s dry, warm weather motivated me to do some yard work. In addition to mowing grass and cleaning and mulching flowerbeds, I sighed and began the exhausting but highly satisfying task of trimming hedges.

I used to be able to do them all plus cleanup in one day, but now I have to divide my trimming and mulching into several days or risk not being able to move the next morning. Each year I wind up adding more days. The upshot is that I got lots of exercise, and now I can simply play golf and mow once a week all through the summer!

Regular readers of this column may recall a silly hedge-trimming incident I wrote about a few years ago. It was the day of one of the Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup Finals games and happened just about an hour before the puck dropped. I accidentally sliced the cable going into my house and was left with a TV full of nothing but static. I panicked and wound up splicing together the cable with an extender piece I found in my junk drawer. Unbelievably, it worked. I was too embarrassed to tell the cable company.

You might also recall a column I wrote about a year later when a truck knocked out the utility pole in the corner of my yard. The pole hung on the power lines for about six months before a new pole showed up and all of the utility companies migrated their lines to it. The cable company eventually dug a new line through my yard from the new pole into my house. I still never mentioned the cable slicing to them.

Fast forward to last week when I came home from work to find no cable or internet service. Neither the cable company nor my neighbors had other outages. I restarted all of the equipment multiple times and even went outside to check that line coming into the house. I wiggled it a bit, and the cable and internet were restored. This time, I scheduled a service call and told the entire ridiculous story to the nice cable guy. He laughed and said he’d heard far worse. The internet signal was still wonky and he checked around and said it wasn’t my fault after all: The crew that dug and installed the new cable line to my house apparently hadn’t done it properly and water had seeped into the line on both ends. He said he wondered how I had any service at all, ran a new line and checked out every single connection inside and outside the house. Now, I’m back up and running at full strength.

Feeling vindicated, I called to complain about the shoddy line-running and wound up getting a few bucks off my cable bill this month. Some people are cord-cutting to save money, but I just did it by mistake!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.