With leaves…

This thanksgiving I was in Fresno, Ca visiting family. It was the day after eating turkey and cranberry sauce and it is tradition for all the kids to help their grandfather out up Christmas lights.

They were having a great time doing this without my help so I decided to rake up all the leaves that he had on the lawn and street.

There was a ton of leaves, I mean I had a beautiful Calvin and Hobbes pile of leaves.

While I am raking, blowing and sweeping, cars keep zooming by on our residential road and I got an idea!

What if I raked the leaves into the street and made them look like a speed bump? Would people slow down? Would it have any effect at all (since we have tried everything short of throwing ourselves out into the street to get people to stop and nothing worked)?

So here’s what I made.

As you can see, it is not a “big” speed bump but it has nice definition.

So I get this thing made and boom right off the bat someone comes tearing around the corner in a big truck…

Let’s stop just for a second so I can tell you how I was feeling right at that moment. My hands tightened around the broom handle. I was kind of scared cause I didn’t want someone douche bro to get out of their car and start a fight over it. I was basically waiting to go back into the street and sweep the leaves into the compost because there is no way leaves are gonna make anyone slow down.

…as the driver rounds the corner of the street you can literally hear the speed up and then instant deceleration of the truck as they see there is something in the road. The driver then sort of creeps up to the leaves at about 5–8 mph and looks at me and smiles and waves.

“Holy crap”, I said.

“I did it, I got someone to slow down.”

This went on for about 2 hours, me pushing the leaves back into place, someone driving down the street a little too fast, sees the leafy bump and slows way down.

It was amazing.

Here’s a video I made commemorating my achievement

Here’s to safer streets and cool ideas and then making silly videos out of them.