{"id":1785,"date":"2007-12-16T19:52:11","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T00:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1785"},"modified":"2007-12-16T19:57:17","modified_gmt":"2007-12-17T00:57:17","slug":"my-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1785","title":{"rendered":"My Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Background: I’m not the handiest guy in the world.<\/p>\n

Oh, I can do what I need <\/em>to do. I worked part of my way through college as a stagehand, which involved basic carpentry and being a bit of an electrician. I learned what I needed to, practiced it constantly, and got to be fairly good at it – and then forgot most of it pretty promptly. Or at least the practical stuff; I could still do the intellectual <\/em>part of it, like designing a lighting plot, pretty capably, I think. And hanging Leakos ain’t brain surgery, if you catch my drift. But still, other than my brief stint as a roofer and sider after college, I’ve never done a whole lot in the building trades.<\/p>\n

But I have an appraisal tomorrow, with an aim toward refinancing my house.<\/p>\n

Between being not-that-handy, and the, er, tumult of the past few years – well, there’s some “deferred maintenance” around the Berg house. And a whooooole bunch of it came off the “deferred” list; it’s stuff that’ll sidetrack an FHA appraisal. Nothing serious (that I know of, please, dear G*d), but stuff that I can fix.<\/p>\n

In theory. Have I mentioned, I’m not much of a handyman?<\/p>\n

Well, this weekend it was time to do what I do best; fake being things I’m not.<\/p>\n

I shook off last week’s flu\/cold\/crud the best I could (although the kids are both pretty well stricken), and put together my “to do” list:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Repair my back porch, and put up a stair railing<\/strong>. FHA appraisals are pretty humorless about railings. Gotta have ’em. And my back porch was a rotting mess; it was actually missing the bottom step. So I ripped out the old steps, replaced some rotted braces, and finally put up a railing. A really, really, rinky-dink railing that qualifies as a “railing” in the same way that Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony was “truthful”, but it should pass muster (until such time as I tear the entire back stoop down and replace it – hopefully in the next 15 months).<\/li>\n
  2. Add a railing to my basement stairs.<\/strong> There’s never <\/em>been one. The FHA, she don’t care. So up went the railing.<\/li>\n
  3. Fix the basement toilet: <\/strong>It ain’t pretty – nobody’s used it in years – but it works. Done.<\/li>\n
  4. Replace the light fixture in my bedroom<\/strong>. I hate light fixtures. Still doesn’t work. My have to play dumb tomorrow.<\/li>\n
  5. Fix a couple of holes in some plaster walls<\/strong>: Done.<\/li>\n
  6. Fix the lock on my cellar-to-the-back-yard door<\/strong>. Done.<\/li>\n
  7. Replace two panes of glass<\/strong> on one of my old windows that my son broke a few years back. I had no idea how easy cutting glass was! I actually like that part of the job.<\/li>\n
  8. Replace the peeling linoleum<\/strong> on my bathroom floor. Almost done!<\/li>\n
  9. Prime over some, er, “art” <\/strong>my son left during a brief spate of grafitti-mongering. In the hallway. Words were had.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The final tally: Five trips to Menard’s, one to Home Depot.<\/p>\n

    Gotta finish the glass, and then, er, “tidy up” a bit.<\/p>\n

    Naturally, among your various prayers, karmic imprecations and other wishes for people in real, genuine <\/em>need around the world – the people of Iraq, the Burmese, the Venezuelans and Cubans and Dharfuris – if you could squeeze in another word for me, I’d much appreciate it. The last bout seems to have worked, so far – I’m actually in the running <\/em>for a mighty decent loan. It’d solve a lot <\/em>of problems.<\/p>\n

    (And let’s hope a feel better tomorrow.\u00a0 Blaaaagh)<\/p>\n

    Thanks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Background: I’m not the handiest guy in the world. Oh, I can do what I need to do. I worked part of my way through college as a stagehand, which involved basic carpentry and being a bit of an electrician. I learned what I needed to, practiced it constantly, and got to be fairly good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}