Blogging blah. Took a break from posting past few days while I proved myself utterly inept as a handyman. Had a three-day weekend off work and Friday we had a fine trip to Coos Bay and the coast where we introduced Baby Peter to the ocean again. Saturday and Sunday I spent much of the time in an increasingly epic struggle to install a screen door at our home.
Handyman skills don't come easily to me. I have long accepted that anytime I put something together whether it a bookshelf or table or what-have-you, I will put it entirely together once, realize I screwed up somewhere along the way, take it all apart and start over to get it done correctly. It's hard not being handy. My father is the kind of man who can and has built entire decks, rooms, cars and probably airplanes without breaking a sweat, whereas I have trouble assembling bookshelf kits from Kmart. I lack some essential element of patience and understanding of physics to make things work easily.
Anyways this all leads to the great screen door battle of '04, which is nearly won after much cussing. We need a nice screen door on the front of our house, which gets rather stuffy in summer, and just leaving the door open isn't an option because of the cats and the bugs that like to fly in. So I bought a nice door kit at Lowe's Saturday and began the tricky work of installation. Turns out our door frame is quite unusual so I had to yank part of that out leaving an unsightly bit of wiring, mortar and unpainted house exposed. (Did I mention we're renting the house?) Then I had to file down part of the frame to fit the hinges on. I drilled multiple holes in the metal door which is quite hard on the hands after a while. But the worst by far has been the installation of the friggin' door handle, a torture device that the Nazis would be proud of. So far I have managed to install the handle only to find it won't open from the outside, a problem only if you want to actually enter the house; taken it apart and put it back on to find the handle doesn't line up on the inside and bangs into the frame; torn the whole mess out again with a sigh and decided to work on it again another day. Will make another attempt to get the handle right tonight. Or just drink heavily. Haven't decided which. Next time I'm just buying another fan.
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