I always think about something along these lines about cars.
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Leaf blowers piss me the fuck offffff VvRrrmmmm Five seconds later… VRRRMMMMMM Sound gets closer… VRRRRRrrrMmmmmmMMMMM!!!
As a scandinavian I never got what the deal is. Just let it decompose? Or use a rake, it's not that hard.
Then I visited Texas, and leafblowers were everywhere to the point where I had to ask a coworker "why do you guys hate leaves so much?"
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Gas ones are banned in my town starting June 1st. Going to be reporting so many people.
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My grandfather got in a minor disagreement with his neighbor one time. Shortly after I went to his house to visit and saw his neighbor on the roof blowing leaves off his roof on to my grandfather's lawn.🤣
I'm always taken aback by the hate. Where and how do you guys live that this is an issue?! Let alone a major annoyance?! I can scarcely imagine noticing leaf blower noise. It's no worse than gas mowers and those are everywhere (or used to be), and go for far longer. Is this just a circle-jerk complaint kinda thing?
I know everyone around here thinks they're an ADHD, autistic, OCD mess, but can no one tune out background noise? (No, you're not special, more likely an normal adult human with modern life issues.) If anything it should be old people bitching as hearing discretion gets more difficult in middle-age+.
The homeless guy that lives behind our Lowe's probably gets annoyed at the 9PM blowing, but that's a 20-30 minute thing, and not too late. (Always felt a bit bad when I closed.) I pick every tiny bit of plastic out though. Not in my waterways!
A bit snarky, I know, but those were serious questions.
And BTW, organic refuse gets blown in the street because passing vehicles reduce it to dust very quickly. All organic, no harm no foul in my book. Also, it's hellacious to corral that stuff for sweeping, no point.
EDIT: This post reminded me I need a new battery blower. And if you think 5-minutes of noise while I blow out my truck bed and driveway is too much, I don't know what to tell you.
I know everyone around here thinks they're an ADHD, autistic, OCD mess, but can no one tune out background noise?
Drag is often in physical pain and crying on the floor because of the leaf blower, but sure, autism is fake.
Maybe it is a hearing difference. I was never into loud music and my hearing is still very good.
They're loud, they kick up dust, and they happen at intermittent times based on when the neighbors do it. they also use fossil fuels. Loud mowers are annoying, too! If you -- heaven forbid -- want to keep your windows open and feel a breeze, you're going to get all of that noise and maybe even some of the dust.
I understand that we have to clear sidewalks and driveways so that accidents don't happen. People usually don't have so much sidewalk + driveway that a broom or something wouldn't do that job quickly. But then we have to blow the leaves off the lawn, too? I know that your HOA will kill you if you don't, but doesn't it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer, when the leaves would have biodegraded into new topsoil? To spend so much time watering a lawn to keep it alive when the leaves would have shielded it from the sun? Why are we spending so much time, money, water, and effort to maintain sterile grass lawns? We can have beautiful outdoors spaces without being slaves to an HOA enforcing what plants we grow.
I understand that it's really the HOAs these days that are a big part of the problem. A good number of people in my HOA-less neighborhood have diverse plants in front of their homes. They look fantastic, they seem to take way less maintenance (I never see them mowing, watering, weeding, fertilizing, etc), and ofc they're much better for the environment.
doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer
I think you are imagining leaves from small and widely spaced trees. We do not put down fertilizer, but we remove leaves from the part of our yard we want to include grass. The parts of the yard we let the leaves stay kills all the grass (hardier plants grow there, but they are not compatible with mowing to a walk-over height). Leaf mould easily takes two years to create, and grass needs sunlight in a half year from fall. Chopping it up helps, but at the volume created by our over-hundred-year-old oak and several other large trees, even chopped there is just too much mass per lawn area to be able to leave it and not kill the grass.
fair enough. It's another reason why grass doesn't make sense to me -- it's so incompatible with the landscape unless you put in the effort to make it habitable. Maybe there's a type of ivy that would have an acceptable max height instead?
So, again, what sort of space do you live in where this is annoyance? I'm only aware of leaf blowers when I'm driving and a lawn service is blowing.
Who's complaining is my question. People in nice hoods with the neighbors going nuts? Apartment complexes? Is this an autumn thing where leaves fall everywhere?
I have lived in suburbs, subdivisions, and city neighborhoods with green space. People (or their landscapers) use leaf blowers in all of them.
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I understand your skepticism, but gas-powered leaf blowers have annoyed the hell out of me for years. I live in a relatively small city in Northern California, and I can always hear and smell a leaf blower before I can even see it. I can't overstate how strongly gas-powered leaf blowers smell. The smell of gas permeates my apartment, even with the windows closed, and is the kind of smell that gets stuck my nostrils for hours. The noise is pretty disruptive, but the smell is way worse to be honest. I'm not sure why they smell so much worse than other gas-powered things, but it's like they're just spewing gas out into the air.
I have no problem with electric or battery-powered leaf blowers, just please use them at a reasonable time of day - after 8am and before 10pm.
Gas powered leaf blowers are small two stroke engines, you’re smelling oil burning (oil is mixed with gasoline to lubricate, it burns by design), and those engines tend to be jetted to run rich so they don’t burn up too quickly.
Unburned gasoline, unburned oil, burned oil are the extra smells that you don’t get from a lawnmower, which would be four stroke like a car.
Two strokes are also noisier than four. They fire twice as often as four strokes, and for the purposes of a leaf blower, they also rev higher.
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I'm Brazilian. As one can imagine, we do have a lot of leaves, being a tropical country and all.
I have not seen a leaf blower in my entire life, and I don't understand the obsession with them.
Being in a tropical country, I imagine most/all of your trees are non-deciduous, as in they don't lose all their leaves in autumn and then regrow in the spring? Imagine all the leaves drying up, falling off, and the mess is left all over the ground. Cleanup is a laborious effort. Leaf blowers speed up the process by blowing the leaves from trafficked locations and/or to more centralized locations that are easier to clean the debris. Helpful, noisy, and often environmentally unfriendly.
You're correct about most trees not following your typical seasonal variance.
You're incorrect about this meaning we don't deal with significant amounts of leaves and flowers. Search for Handroanthus images, then imagine one on each sidewalk, and imagine all their flowers on the ground.
Peiple just use "rastelos" here (is there even a translation?)
A rake?
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I agree that overuse of them is an issue, but damn they come in handy more than I thought it would... Mine is at least electric, and cleaning out dusty stuff (fans, cars, rugs, etc) is so quick and easy... I almost never use mine for grass or leaves.
Ditto. Primarily mine is used to "sweep" the shop and dry off motorcycles after washing.
If on the scale of annoyance gas leaf blowers are 10/10, electric are 3/10.
Yeah! Clean the coils onthe fridge fast and easy. (Open windows first. Close cupboard doors.)
Oof, I’d go shop vac there. You’re just spreading it around, no?
am i the baddie?
You know, I was just— bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Your comment blows, dude...
Blowers should be illegal.
The answer to the world's problems ..... remove leaf blowers
you jest, but children around the world are no longer starving thanks to this post.
you jest, but various pollinators depend on leaf coverage for winter protection. Fewer pollinators does result in less food...
They were invented in the 1950s.
So the Depression and the World Wars were quieter....
I was also invented in the 1950s, and you did not start to see them until the 70s or 80s.
we are blessed here to have the noise in the winter, too. more than three flakes of snow and there's sure to be a legion of leaf blowers clearing off precious pavement in neighborhoods all over town. the guys that do it at 4-5am are the true treasures.
I had a neighbor who was rather compulsive about her yard. She would mow her yard/have it mowed 2-3 times a week and would use a leaf blower to push the grass clippings onto her neighbors yard every time. She would also leaf blow her roof with surprising frequency.
I gotta say, I was a little relieved when I saw the for sale sign in the yard earlier this year.