Cursing...

the darkness.

So we're trying to fit in with this whole suburban obsession with lawns, gardens and related environs. Toward that end, the wife bought some solar-powered decorative lights. This was probably well over a year ago. Last week, I finally opened up the boxes, screwed the lights together, and stuck them in the ground.

And then...nothing. They didn't light up at all the first night. Oh well, maybe they need more time in the sun to charge up fully.

The next night...nothing.

The next day, wise mother-in-law asks if we turned them on. Huh? There's a little switch on each of them that has to be turned on. D'oh!

So we flipped the switches, and that night, Fiat Lux!

The next night, they looked like this:



Notice how there's a neat row of four on one side of the driveway, but only three on the other side? "Hey, wife, what happened to the light at the end of the driveway?"

"I dunno, maybe it's burned out."

"After a day? No way."

Not enough sun? Nah. Switch flipped to "off" again? Who knows? So she goes to check, and discovers that someone has popped the top of the fixture and removed the special solarly-recharged (?) batteries. Nice.

A day later, Daughter Uno is riding her bike in the driveway when she finds one of the missing batteries, scratched and lopsided, as if it's been thrown at the sidewalk and/or run over by a truck. So, no, they don't explode, at least not unless you throw them a lot harder and/or run them over with a bigger truck. As to what happened to them, I figure it was either:
(a) kids...damned kids
(b) some sort of suburban tribal initiation rite/prank
(c) someone who really, really, really needed a double-A battery and just happened to be walking past our driveway between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Friday night. If so, glad we could help. Not sure why you had to break one of them, but maybe it all made sense at the time. Now, would you mind replacing them? With one of our eight lights out, we feel like we're only 87.5% successful at the whole suburban lawn-decorating thing.