Vacuuming the yard
One day one of the other tenants in the building where I live dumped a shitload of styrofoam peanuts into one of the trash bins. When the garbage collecting truck came and the automatic arm grabbed the container and whooshed it up into the air, guess where the peanuts went. Yep. All over our yard, and the neighbor's yard, and the yard after that. No one would admit to having done this; the front yard was a mess; no one was stepping forward to clean it up.
So I went out there and started trying to gather them up. I felt like Lucy Ricardo trying to pluck up a room full of chicken feathers, one feather at at time. Then I tried a long-tined garden rake. I'd swoop up one rake full of them and then half of them would flutter off of the rake as I raised it up to deposit them into the collecting box. Then a gust of wind would kick up and blow half the ones out of the box I had already collected. What a nightmare. That stuff truly is an ecological hazard and, in my opinion, ought to be banned.
Anyway, I got the bright idea of trying a vacuum cleaner. I used to have a very big shop vac on wheels, with a two-inch-diameter hose that, when you connected the two lengths of it together, was about 20 feet long. I rolled the shop vac outside, fired it up, and PRESTO! Worked like magic. I did the entire yard in short order, and then went rolling up the street with it to do the two neighboring yards. Imagine the looks on people's faces as they drove by and saw this nut outside vacuuming the yard! But it worked!!