Where I Might Have To Turn In My Balls - Part 2

Last summer we had to have our house tented for termites. During the process the fumigators had to tear down a piece of our fencing so they could get the tent on the garage. Since then there's been an opening on the side of the garage that allows a space going up to the front gate on the side of the garage. Last week M went out and bought some lumber so that I could finally close that up now that we have another dog and she likes to go chasing after our cats along that opening since that's where the cats travel through. Should be pretty easy right, it's only like a 3 foot gap. Wrong.

I tore off the old wood that was still attached to the garage so that I could start with fresh lumber that wasn't all rotted out. Easy enough, cut a 2X4 to length, level it, nail to garage. From there, I was going to put three cross members to the other side of the chanlink/wood fence that borders the neighbor's yard and then put up planking to cover the gap. At this point my neighbor here's me hammering and asks if I need some help. Sure I say, it'd be great if she could hold up the cross members so I could get those level while nailing them in.

She comes over and I proceed start putting up the cross members. After I get them up, she checks up the setup and the strength of the cross members (since they are only going to be attached at one point), looks at me and says, "Yeah, this isn't going to work. Let me tell you what we need to do." At this point she goes into great detail on we need to attach another 2X4 to her cross beams for her wood fence then secure the cross members to that with hardware. All the while I'm standing there just nodding, looking like a home improvement dumbass.

I have to say, if she hadn't offered to come over and help me out, I probably would have ended up with a rickety, Mickey Mouse fence section. Since it of course, with her input, came out golden and sturdy as hell. Though I did have to run back to Home Depot again since the planking M got from there was riddled with termites. I mean, WTF is up with that?! Just what someone wants, wood you're attaching to a structure that is termite infested. Nice quality control.

Oh, I almost forgot the part where I had to enlist the help of her partner to get one of the planks cut on an angle so that it would line up nicely at the end. Lesbians to the rescue! Again

Where I Might Have To Turn In My Balls

Here's the thing, I'm one of those guys that's not super handy. I mean, I can do basic stuff like mow the lawn, do routine maintenance around the house, etc. But I'm not one of those guys could rewire his house or build an add on to our house. Lately we've been having a lot of trouble with our back door locks and I figured WTF, I'll go buy a new lock set and try putting it in myself.

This weekend I attempted said install. Shockingly, I had actually purchased locks that looked they would be the same size as the old piece of shit ones I was trying to replace. So far so good.

The top deadbolt went in no problem. Believe me, no one is more surprised about this than me. Then came the actual door knob {tee-hee...knob} replacement. I got the old knob out no problem. Here's where it got sideways.

For the life of me, I could not get the two pieces of new door knob to match up for the life of me. I sat there struggling for probably 20-30 minutes trying to get it to go together, the last 10 minutes of that cursing up a blue streak. At that point my neighbor came over to visit the mutts since she heard them out running around. She asked me what I was doing and after explaining to her what kind of a hassle I was running into, she offered to take a look.

She spent about 45 seconds looking at it, she stopped, stood up and laughed. She points at the bolt part that gets screwed into the door, that the inside/outside knobs connect to and says, "You might want to try putting that in, you know, the way it's supposed to go."

Fuck! At least I can take comfort in the fact that my neighbor's a lesbian and she's supposed to know this stuff better than I am anyway...right?