The sad truth is most of those lovely solar outdoor garden ornaments aren’t actually made for the outdoors…

I just brought in one of these from the front yard to figure out why it wasn’t lighting up anymore, as it was getting plenty of sunlight where it was. Turned out half of it was full of rain water, and the wires inside connecting all the little LEDs corroded and broke. 

I can try fixing it but why bother, it’s obviously not meant to be kept outside anywhere it rains. It seals pretty tightly but notice how the top where the solar panel is sits just slightly in from the rim of the glass bottom. Water is always going to seep slowly into that glass unless you seal it so tightly you can’t get it off to take out the battery…something I do to all my garden lights at the end of every season, and replace it with a new one at the beginning of the next.

This is just one small detour in a tale I’ll probably go into later, about how this year’s flower and garden lights display went badly wrong. A combination of the high heat, my return to work subtracting time from housework, and my aging body not having the energy needed to do everything I wanted to do this year.