That Time with the Shower Cap
Okay, so I gotta talk about this thing I did. Had this planter box out front, right? Total pain. Every time we got a decent rain, mud splashed all over the damn porch. Looked terrible. Called it my ‘UGA’ – Ugly Garden Annoyance. Seriously, spent more time cleaning the porch than enjoying the flowers.
Tried a few things. Mulch helped a bit, but not enough. Looked into fancy splash guards, stuff like that. Seemed like overkill. You know how sometimes you just get fed up? That was me.
Then one morning, was getting ready, saw a pack of cheap shower caps we bought for guests or something. Never used ’em. Lightbulb moment, kinda. Thought, what if I just… covered the dirt?
Here’s what I did, step-by-step:
- Grabbed one of those flimsy plastic shower caps.
- Went out to the UGA planter.
- Carefully stretched the elastic edge of the cap over the rim of the planter box.
- Had to kinda tuck it around the base of the plants. Took some fiddling. Looked absolutely ridiculous, not gonna lie. My neighbor probably thought I’d lost it.
- Made sure it was snug enough not to blow away but loose enough for water to drain if it got really soaked.
Looked stupid? Yeah. But you know what? Next time it rained, porch stayed clean. The cap kept the soil in the damn box. Water still got to the plants, mostly around the edges and through the stem openings I left.
Did it last?
Well, not forever. Those cheap caps aren’t exactly heavy-duty. Sun baked ’em, they got brittle after a few months. Had to replace it. But for a quick fix? Brilliant. Cost practically nothing. Sometimes you just need something now, not the perfect engineered solution later.
It reminds me of this one time at my old job, before I started doing my own thing. We had this server issue, constantly crashing. Everyone’s proposing these massive overhauls, migrating platforms, rewriting code. Took weeks. Then this one quiet dude, Gary, writes like a ten-line script that just restarts the damn service when it hangs. Wasn’t elegant. Wasn’t the ‘right’ way. But it stopped the bleeding while they figured out the real fix. Sometimes you just gotta slap a shower cap on the problem.
So yeah. The shower cap UGA fix. Simple. A bit silly. But it worked when I needed it to. Still makes me chuckle thinking about it.
