{"id":6625,"date":"2026-09-06T15:01:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T05:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/?p=6625"},"modified":"2026-09-07T15:02:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T05:02:54","slug":"fighting-a-losing-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/2026\/09\/fighting-a-losing-battle\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting a Losing Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mum recently decided to help Jo protect her garden from the possums that had been treating it as their own private salad bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She did some research, put up bird netting and spent quite a bit of time trying to make the garden less accessible to the little night-time thieves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The possums, naturally, took this as a challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the next morning, they had apparently found a way around Mum\u2019s defences and carried on as usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then came the second part of the story. Jo, without having gone outside to inspect Mum\u2019s handiwork, passed on some advice from ChatGPT about what Mum could have done differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This did not go down especially well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mum had done the research, bought the materials and tackled the job herself, so receiving computer-generated advice afterwards was perhaps not the response she had been hoping for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jo, I suspect, thought she was simply being helpful. Mum felt rather less enthusiastic about the whole experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I found myself somewhere in the middle, feeling sorry for Mum, amused by the persistence of the possums, and reminded once again that helping family can be a funny mixture of love, effort, frustration and good intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For now, I think the possums are winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes helping someone doesn\u2019t quite go according to plan. Add a few determined possums to the mix, and things can unravel surprisingly quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[437],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6627,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6625\/revisions\/6627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamjak.com\/ma2005\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}