Life was simpler when my world was defined with engineer tape and land mines.

• It’s a good feeling when the retired Army Colonel that teaches JROTC at Girlie Bear’s school shakes my hand and tells me we’re doing a good job raising her.
• Irish Woman had me out putting up Halloween lights this weekend.  Apparently “I want to take a break from outside work” means different things to different people.
• It is worth it to me to pay extra money to have the gutter guys back out to put in another down spout and then spend a weekend fashioning a subterranean drain system for the new downspout in order to make my wife happy with the lines on the new front gutter.
• The van has risen from the grave again.  My worst case scenario of a bad alternator didn’t pan out.  It was a loose and corroded battery cable.  At least that was what I hope was wrong with it. Once that was corrected, the battery metered out at the correct voltage, both when the engine was off and when the engine was on.  Time will tell.
• Safety tip – Old aluminum gutters have very sharp edges.
• Those of you who have met me will have a hard time believing this, but I smiled so much tonight that my face hurts.
• After spending four hours at the Louisville Zoo handing out candy next to the “Disco From Outer Space”, I can report the following:
  • I do not love the night life, and I do not like to boogie.
  • I do not have a groove thing to shake
  • I am ready to empty a halon bottle on the disco inferno.
• Ladies, if you’re taking your children trick or treating, it is not necessary to wear your streetwalker costume.
• I was amazed by how many kids had good manners tonight.  My faith in the future has been reenergized.
• Being an observer of young children dancing under a disco ball for a few hours shows me that even at a young age, you can easily tell the extroverts from the introverts.
• Most popular costume for boys:  Iron Man or Captain America
• Most popular costume for girls:  Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, which surprised me.
• Coming home to warm biscuits and hot beef stew on a rainy night is wonderful.

• Good – Spending the better part of Monday afternoon in a cubicle and conference room with a colleague working to diagnose and correct an issue with his systems.
• Bad – Said colleague calls in sick on Tuesday with strep throat
• Good – Getting effective treatment for your arthritis so that you can be a contributing member of society
• Bad – Said treatment suppresses your immune system so that it doesn’t attack your body, so you’re more susceptible to infection from co-workers with strep throat.
• Good – Going to bed Tuesday night feeling well
• Bad – Waking up Wednesday morning with just about everything wrong with your respiratory system except pneumonia.
• Not sure why I bother to have a primary physician anymore.  I haven’t been able to get in to see her when I’m sick for several months.  She’s wonderful for preventive things like physicals, but when I need her to help me get over the ick, there’s a two day wait.
• The doc in the box, on the other hand, got me in and out in 30 minutes.
• “Go to bed and rest” he says.  “You’ll feel better after some sleep” he says.
  • Irish Woman worked from home today, and her schedule was full of conference calls that require her to be on her computer in the bedroom all afternoon.
  • Sleeping on the couch was out because the new gutters were being installed, and the gutter guys were playing whack-a-mole with the old gutters.
  • Bluegrass was losing her mind trying to get through the front door to stomp a mudhole in someone.
  • I guess I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
• NyQuil – For when moonshine just isn’t letting you breathe through your nose and sleep.
• Girlie Bear has her first air rifle competition.  To say she’s excited might be a bit of an understatement.
• Is it “feed a cold and starve a fever”, or is it “drown both in corn liquor and spicy food”?
• ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

• You’d think that it wouldn’t take two days, four trips to the lumber yard, and two back aches to build a step/platform that is 6 inches high, 39 inches wide, and 79 inches long, but it did.
• I really need to buy a table saw.
• There is a fine line between “Can you help me pick out the correct screw for the project I’m doing?” and “How do I do the project my wife wants me to do?” when you agree to answer a question posed by a young man at the hardware store.
  • Little did he know that I’m just as clueless as him.
• They don’t make concrete like they used to.
  • It took a lot of time to drill a two-inch pilot hole in the 60-year-old top of our porch.  The same hole took about 10 seconds to drill in the 8-year-old sidewalk next to it.
• Fall has reached that “Too cold to just wear a tee-shirt, too warm to wear a sweater when you’re working outside” stage.
• I noticed yesterday that the plastic that protects the fiber optic cable we use at work is the same color and consistency as the Hot Wheels tracks I played with as a kid.  I always wondered where those things went.
• Taking two four-year-old boys to a farm to pick pumpkins, run up and down a hay-bale pyramid, ride ponies, and eat hot dogs was the most enjoyable thing we’ve done as a family in a long time.
• Famous dad last words “Yes, you may get whatever pumpkin you want, but you have to carry it.”
  • Girlie Bear got a pumpkin that was almost as heavy as Boo.
• Made another batch of spaghetti sauce with the last of the tomatoes and peppers from the garden.  Looks like we’ll be pulling out everything next weekend.
  • It is infinitely more enjoyable to do canning when it’s not over 100 degrees out and humid.
• Plans for next year’s garden expansion are already underway.
  • I also need a small backhoe.
• Bluegrass has never been a bird dog, but she does know how to point at the hot air balloon she wants me to blow out of the sky so she can retrieve it.
• Looks like I’ll finish the initial phase of the porch project just in time to begin leaf raking season.
• I have been informed that I am forbidden to hang a deer from the new porch.
• A cat will never admit that she misjudged the distance between the easy chair and the couch, even when you watch her fall short and have to scramble to not face plant.

• Dear Contractor:  “We’ll send a crew tomorrow to put on your new gutters” does not mean “We’ll be by on Tuesday or Wednesday”.
• I guess we’ll know soon if our new roof is going to work.  It’s supposed to rain tonight.
• There is something to be said for putting your headphones on, cranking up the music, and just shutting out the rest of the office while you work.
• Be careful when you ask me to do something unreasonable.  I just might do it.
• It must be good to be Boo.  Donuts and fruit for breakfast, a day spent playing with Irish Woman and Girlie Bear, and then a four hour nap.    He finished the day off with pancakes for breakfast and a movie.
  • The Young Prince is living the dream
• Ordering a salad from Cracker Barrel for dinner appears to break some Kentucky culinary law.  I’m sure the authorities will be by later to force feed me a big mess of biscuits and sausage gravy.
• Apparently our 11-year-old Labradors still make good watch dogs.  They raised hell when two gentlemen from the roofing company came by to see how things looked.
• Made the decision for the steps to the porch that if a 2×4 will work for framing, then a 4×4 will work even better.
  • If it’s worth building, it’s worth overbuilding

When you are inside your home and not paying strict attention to what goes on outside your window, a large load of old shingles falling off your roof looks and sounds a lot like a member of a roofing crew falling to his doom.

In other news, I now know that I can get out of my side door from the living room and into the front yard in less than three seconds if I’m properly motivated.

• I’m pretty sure Irish Woman’s journal entry for tonight will begin “Dear Diary, Today I worked my husband like a rented mule.”.
• The gods of do-it-yourself hate me.  A bottle of concrete sealer cost $25.  We bought 2.  I hoped to do it with one and return the other one to the store.
  • It took precisely 1.10 bottles of concrete sealer to put two coats on our concrete porch.
  • I may be able to use the rest when I reseal our patio, but don’t count on it. That may not happen until next spring and by then I may have a chunk of nice, glossy plastic in the shape of the inside of a bottle
• Dear Lumber Manufacturers – 8 feet is 96 inches.  Not 96.25, nor is it 96.5, or even 95.5.  96.  Out of 38 decking boards I worked with today, 25 of them were 96.25, 12 were 96.5, and one was 95.5.   Someday I will find you and I will spend an enjoyable evening running the antique furniture in your boardroom through a wood chipper.
• Tapcon concrete screws are a wonder of modern engineering.  Tapcon masonry drill bits are a ball of suck and fail.
• Tally of materials for the weekend –
  • 12 10 foot 2×4, pressure treated
  • 10 8 foot 2×4, pressure treated
  • 38 8 foot (see above note) 5/4×6 pressure treated decking planks
  • 5 pounds of 2 1/2 inch decking screws
  • 42 Tapcon screws
  • 1 Tapcon drill bit, broken in two while in use
  • 2 new Bosch masonry bits, one of which lost its temper while trying to drill through a piece of aggregate
  • 2 batteries for the cordless drill, completely drained
  • 1 15mg Meloxicam
  • 3 325mg Aspirin
  • 3 beers
  • 3 quarts of water
• It is amazing what you will find when you pull the bottom two or three rows of siding off of an old house.
• You know you’re funky when you spend as much time cleaning the tub after your shower as you did cleaning yourself.
• The top deck of the porch is done.  Next weekend I will build the step for the front of the porch, cover all vertical surfaces in a manner yet to be determined, and begin planning and design for the porch extension off the back of the bloody thing.
  • I just keep repeating “I love my wife and I want her to be happy, for when she is happy, I have the opportunity for happiness” as I do these things.

DaddyBear is no longer allowed to tell a customer that the Psychic Friends Network is down when asked to guess a rather critical piece of data. He is also prohibited from using the term DAN or ‘Dumbass Area Network’ at the office.

• Once you mix the water and latex adhesive with Mr. Fast Drying Cement, time is not your friend.
• It is amazing how much a difference it makes to actually have the correct tool for the job.
• It is also amazing how much easier doing a job becomes when you decide that ‘pretty’ is not a requirement.
  • The concrete repair work we did this weekend is going to be covered with wood decking, so all I needed was for it to be sound, strong, and watertight.
• I have had an extraordinary month in car repair.  I have never had to replace the battery in each and every vehicle I own in one calendar month.  Today, I made that happen.
• Ladies, when your husband is bent over the engine of your car in front of an auto parts store in a bad neighborhood, sitting in the driver’s seat and making witty comments about the drunks and tweekers who are stumbling down to the convenience store next door doesn’t do much for his nerves.
• Dear Chrysler Engine Compartment Engineer – I hope you and everyone you ever loved dies in a fire. 
  • If I have to tear parts of the engine out in order to get to the battery, you are wrong
  • If the bolt that holds the battery containment bar, also known as “That !#$! piece of steel”, is 9/32, and the nuts that hold the cables to the battery are 10mm, you are wrong.
  • If it takes a maneuver reminiscent of docking the space shuttle to the space station to get said battery out of its little space in the engine compartment, with a repeat to put the new one in, then you are wrong.
• When you are shot in the facemask with a wax bullet about 3.5 seconds into a firefight, you have a very long time laying on the cold ground in the dark ahead of you.

When the following goes through your lips, you know it’s been a frustrating day:

Screw it, I’m going to the hardware store for more lumber and a hammer drill.