My hen started laying eggs in my kid's old toy dump truck

Bertha, my Barred Rock, decided the sandbox was her new favorite spot about two weeks ago. I kept finding her sitting in this bright yellow plastic truck, and sure enough, there was an egg in the bed every single morning. I tried moving her back to the nesting boxes filled with straw, but she just marched right back to her truck. Finally, I just put a handful of pine shavings in the dump truck bed and called it good. Now we collect eggs from a Tonka, and she hasn't missed a day. Has anyone else had a chicken pick a nesting spot this ridiculous?

Spotted 15 Messier objects with just my old binoculars this month

I set a goal to find 10 with my 10x50s from my driveway in Portland, but last night the Double Cluster in Perseus put me over at 15. What's a good next target for basic binoculars, maybe something a bit harder?

Warning: My attempt to fix a wobbly bar stool turned into a glue-covered mess.

Last week, I tried to tighten the legs on my kitchen stool, but the whole thing came apart in my hands, and I accidentally used way too much wood glue. My dog walked through the puddle and left tiny glue footprints all over the linoleum. What's the best way to get dried wood glue off a floor without wrecking it?

Three years ago in a Dayton attic, I found a dusty old splitter that taught me to always bring a toner...

I thought booking a flight on Tuesday was the best deal, but I was wrong.

I tracked prices for a trip to Lisbon for two months and the cheapest days were actually Sunday and Wednesday. The Tuesday thing is just an old myth that doesn't hold up anymore. Has anyone else found a better day to book for their recent trips?

I finally stopped skipping the color profile step in my workflow

I kept seeing amazing pieces online that looked flat and washed out on my phone, and it clicked that it was a color space mismatch. Now I always embed the sRGB profile before I upload anything to Instagram. What's one small step that made a big difference in how your art looks online?

I saw a wedding in Portland where the florist used way too much baby's breath

It was at the Crystal Ballroom last month, and the whole arch looked like a cloud of filler. I think they used maybe 70% baby's breath to 30% actual focal flowers. It made the whole design feel cheap and washed out, even though the roses were probably expensive. Has anyone else had to talk a client out of overusing filler like that?

A client in Atlanta asked me to fix his 'broken' laptop by just cleaning the fan

He brought it in, said it kept shutting down while he was gaming. I opened it up and the fan was completely clogged with dust and pet hair. After I cleaned it out with compressed air, it ran fine. He was shocked that was all it needed, and asked if I could show him how to do it himself next time. Do you guys ever walk customers through simple fixes like that, or do you think it hurts business?

Vent: The whole 'birds aren't real' thing started as a joke in 2017, but I keep seeing people online treat it like a serious historical cover-up.

I was at a bar in Denver last week and overheard a guy genuinely arguing that all birds were replaced by government drones after 1972, which completely misses the point of the original satire and muddies the water for discussing actual surveillance concerns.

Looking back at old relay logic versus modern controllers

Worked on a 1970s Otis unit in a Boston office building last month. The relay panel was a maze of wires, maybe 200 contacts. Took two days just to trace a single fault. Newer jobs with microprocessor controllers, same fault takes an hour tops. The diagnostic screens show you exactly which safety circuit is open. Miss the old days sometimes, but the time saved is real. Anyone else have a story about switching from relays to solid state?