It’s not hurricane season so I decided to do that later.

SUNDAY, MAY 23, 2010


It’s not hurricane season so I decided to do that later.

Some of you might suspect I am losing my memory. Not my sanity. Most are certain that was lost long ago.

I am sitting in my recliner trying to think of a good excuse. It is not that I can’t. But, I may as well go do it now. I have an easier time dealing in the present or even the past than the future.

Leaving the pluperfect to the dead Romans and my sister the English teacher. She is so dedicated she is hammering at the keys of her pRotable so that she or some IT wizard can post a test for her students. It is a Saturday! That is one of the two days; one even specified by God, when many people with jobs are not even supposed to work. Teachers are not covered by these guidelines because it is one of the few things not specifically addressed in their contracts.

I was glad to talk to her. It gave me another excuse put off doing something that should already be done. I talked to my brother, too. We still do not know the results of his wife’s tests. We are getting a little angry over that. After all, a promise is a promise. But, they just did not say which Friday they would give the results.

A little bit like the vendor on eBay who charged extra for expedited shipping. I am certain the shipping will be expedited. There was a small chance a vendor on eBay would lie according to numbers he has posted in the upper right hand corner of that webpage. What really has my steam up is that he failed to mention in the fine print that the expedited shipping would not occur until AFTER he actually put the battery in a box or envelope, and called the expediting shipper to expedite it! Or, until after the expediting shipper picked it up.

How many different plans can you develop to empty a box of nails? My editor indicated that all should not be completely elaborated upon if I wanted to build a readership. I will not mention those with the red line through the text.

Deciding not to follow the advice of a non-paid professional… I had Plan A thru Plan F on paper before some suffered the indignity of being labeled as not worthy of mention. I will not let that hold me back.

I went through all of Plan A and all of the subsets of it before I had to finally disagree with one of my now dead mentors.

George Wilson used to say: “The dreading is usually far worse than the doing.” I had rarely found George to be wrong about anything with the possible exception of the time when he said: “Your girlfriend won’t mind a bit, me dumping all these dead frogs in the kitchen sink. At least not after she has eaten some fresh fried bullfrog legs.” I will also mention that some of the legs were still moving and attached to the monster frogs. We did not have a Vet handy to pronounce death by gigging. So we attempted dissection and autopsy ourselves at 3 AM one morning without the death certificates.

Since George was rarely wrong I followed his advice and went straight for the new fangled electric 18 volt drill and screw gun that hides behind the piano. Since it was daytime I did not notice any flashing colored lights on the wall from the charging units also hidden there. I will have to Google or find the Owner’s Manual to translate what message these charging units were constantly sending to the outer edges of the universe when it was dark in the living room.

I only pass through that room if it is light outside. Otherwise I try to slip out the back door. If we return from some special First Friday or giddy-up with some friends after dark; I close my eyes passing through the living room. If I do not, I will not get a wink of sleep. I will be on my back listening to sleep noises from a couple of species of faunæ. I may try to guess if the blinking red light emanating from behind the piano means the battery is charged or if the battery is too worn out to charge; complicated sometimes additionally by a mysterious green shadow cast up the wall. I think that could mean that possibly one battery back there might be suitable to use.

But since it was daytime, I did not have a clue… that is unless I pulled out the piano and started testing each battery one at a time by sticking it in the drill I thought it fit in and pulling the trigger. I did exactly that to the small army of these batteries hidden there. SCORE. I hit the lottery. One of the six batteries worked when I slammed it home in the handle of a drill.

Personally, I don’t want to know if one of the batteries can never be charged again. If it will have to wait for burial on city hazardous waste amnesty day. Or, if I could, since it is a battery, sneak into one of the Big Box electronic stores or home repair centers and pull it from under my coat to smash it down through the recycling slot. I can’t just throw it in the garbage. It is far too hot to wear a coat now so the spares will remain behind the piano. George mercifully died before the advent of portable electric tools.

Drill in hand I went to the last known storage place of the rubber bit holster for the variety of bits that might be needed for my electric drill. I think I had eight in it, a failed attempt to bridge the gap from the slot head thru the Phillips; the hex head thru the tamper resistant. Or, just one that fit some old screws I had lying around. FAIL.

I did locate another device that would work in place of the correct bit that might or might not be in the rubber bit holder that should have been wrapped around the barrel of the drill… but wasn’t.

Tamper-proof varieties of screws are designed to stimulate the economy by forcing the thief or vandal to go to the home repair store to buy one of the correct bits to remove them.

I have inadvertently come upon the new fool proof tamper resistant screw. I take a Phillips head screw and drive it almost completely into the wood just leaving enough out so it looks like the guy who screwed it in did not know how to properly drive a screw.

This has never been a conscious decision on my part. It is made by the woods I am trying to fasten together and Chinese screws. After not going all the way in, I attempt to remove said screw by backing it out so I might attempt again to drive it home. At this point if I am successful I should realize that I have a predrilled hole of about the right size. It is time to get the hammer and a nail. Instead I normally attempt to drive the screw all of the way down by rotating it in a clockwise fashion with the Phillips head bit and my trusty cordless electric drill driver.

I know this is a FAIL the moment the screw stops rotating in a clockwise direction and it makes that noise that makes zombies run. I am then unable to then reverse the direction of the screwgun to remove the metal Beelzebub because the Phillips head slot in the screw is completely stripped. Since it is not quite 100% countersunk I knew it is not a perfect tamper resistant screw… it might possibly be removed with a pair of vise grips.

So I am standing in front of the fence scratching my head wondering if I can hang a plant on that screw that is still sticking out and did not do its job properly (or so I think).

Abandoning Plan A, I am starting to feel that the doing is going to end up being way far worse than the dreading by the time I finish the job of getting a small gap in the wood closed so that critters do not have a home in my fence. This is the fence that has stood the test of time and looks good from two sides instead of just one. My neighbor put a one sided fence completely on his property. It is against the law for me to nail anything to that fence, let alone screw it. Fortunately for you we are not going down that road today.

I manage to find what I think is enough nails necessary to complete the job and the BIG framing hammer with the engraved face on it from the darkened dungeon I call the ‘utility room’. Plan B starts with me first attempting to dive in the formerly galvanized too darned long not quite countersunk stripped Phillips head deck screw. FAIL. I have inflicted some round scars on the fence that look a little like the top of my mother’s peanut butter cookies after we decorated them with fork impressions. So Joe was also wrong too when he told me the slots in the top of the screw were for removal only. “All screws should be put in with a hammer instead of a screwdriver.” Not in this case anyway.

Plan C is breaking off this defective tamper resistant screw. It did not go well and the fence now has many peanut butter cookie scars in the vicinity of the screw. Since Plan C did not include finding my vise grip pliers and I want to complete this job before next Saturday I figure it is time to develop a Plan D. Of course, yet another FAIL.

Plan D includes using the five nails that I got out of the dungeon, to pull the board down and close the gap. FAIL. The board ends up cracking but it is not going anywhere because it is being firmly held in place with enough nails the Chinese could remove them and recycle them to manufacture a new tool for America; plus that one tamper resistant screw. But I did close the gap. At least in that board with only five nails.

The problem now is the partial success of Plan D results in the necessity to develop Plan E. Plan E is to go into the dungeon and retrieve sufficient nails to pull down the rest of the boards that are now kind of hanging there loosely in this twenty-five year old fence. Thankfully there is no board in the world left that will match or fit in as a replacement of the cracked board with all of the hammer dents that looks so atrocious to me. To make it match the adjacent boards I decorate all of them with the pretty hammer dents and if I get far enough away from it I do not notice the defects in the repair.

Plan E at least got all the boards close to where they were supposed to be. The right thing to do would have been to take all the boards off and put in a new horizontal stringer between the posts and then put the original board back on. This is now Plan F.

I decided it was just too darn hot to initiate Plan F and had two good excuses not to, already at hand. No, at least ten when I think of it. One excuse includes the swarm of mosquitoes that are buzzing around my head and making it hard to see. Since Plan C had been a FAIL I could at some future time restart Plan C1 which included searching the dungeon for the vise grip pliers. Unfortunately, Plan F will also have to include a trip to the hardware store to buy a new box of nails to replace the empty one still inside the dungeon.

I went inside the house and got some water. I felt lucky I did not have to visit the Public Library to get some. The stainless steel water container was indeed inside the refrigerated safe in the kitchen. I was feeling very good.

As far as it not being hurricane season and what that had to do with anything: this job confirmed my suspicions that no matter how hard you pray, prayers sometimes are just not answered. It did not rain and no hurricane was in sight to take down the fence so the insurance company would pay for all the nails used for the repair. Minus my deductible, of course.

This valuable research confirmed something else I thought… mentors are not always right. It also reminded me that if I take some kid frog gigging (if there are any left that are not extinct (frogs, DUH)… bring the big hammer. Instead of just dumping the croaker sack into the kitchen sink it would be better to FIRST decorate the head of each frog outside the apartment and then put each one individually into the sink. That way you don’t have to keep trying to catch all of the escaped frogs that are bleeding all over the nice rug in the apartment.

Put that hammer away! I am taking a breather and promise to edit before posting rather than after.