Three summers without trying bottom watering? @jordanr89 that's wild, I thought everyone knew to keep the leaves dry by now. Did you lift up your pots and see if they were getting rootbound too?

Wait, was the ground actually the reason your signal died? I mean, it could have been the rain itself messing with the connection or moisture getting into the line. Idk, I've skipped grounding plenty of times during storms and never had a problem like that. Maybe the issue was just a bad connector or water in the box, not the ground loop. People get real obsessed with ground blocks but sometimes you just get unlucky with the weather, not the setup.

Is it really that deep, though?

Oh wow, that's a good tip but I bet there's another piece to this puzzle nobody's talking about. What about the weather on the day you're laying those bricks? If it's hot and dry, the mortar can shrink faster than the bricks and cause those same cracks. Maybe try misting the whole wall lightly after you finish for the day to slow down the drying.

Totally feel you on this. It's like the older tools just had a soul or something, they were built to last and actually work, not just look pretty on a shelf. I've got a couple of my granddad's chisels and they hold an edge way longer than anything I've bought new recently. It's a bummer that quality got swapped out for making things cheaper and faster. Makes you appreciate the stuff that's still around from back then, for real.