I'm not sure you would be overly impressed with some of the rituals and customs that our pagan ancestors performed.
Much worse than tear gas, I bet. It was frat guys that got you, no?
I'm waayyy behind on this thread, but I read that coating the bird seed with hot sauce can be a deterrent. Apparently birds aren't affected by capsaicin but squirrels are.
Whenever my wife wanted to rearrange the furniture in a room, I would draw a scale model of the room and each piece of furniture. I'd hand it to her, and tell her to figure out where she wanted the stuff to be -- I was only moving things one time. Believe it or not, it actually worked!
I had to move my office (all the furniture, all the computer stuff, etc) four times during my 33 years. That's how I did it too. Drew the room dimensions on a piece of graph paper, made cutouts of all desks & tables, and moved them around until I was happy. The third time, when they were reducing the size of my office to something resembling a large shoebox, they had a gal from the main office work with a gal from the "spaces" office in FP&M to design my work space. Neither of them had a clue of what my tasks were and how I prioritized them. They thought I was basically a receptionist (I was a Clerk III - quite a bit higher on the staff food chain). I looked at what they came up with and just had to laugh. I had a bit of a row with the department manager who didn't like me anyway because I was not under her supervision and she thought I should be. My boss got involved and told her that not only was the design pure garbage, the reduction in space was bull because my office was a "public" office, not a private one (ie, clients from outside our unit and from off-campus). He got me back about 5 feet on where the dividing wall was placed, which is a lot more that it sounds like.
I think the time we carried an upright piano up to a second floor apartment was worse than any sleeper sofa. It was one of those stairwells that had 2-3 steps and then turned right for the rest of it. We put a big gouge in the front of it. It was used so they were ok with that.
