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Weekends…

I relish a quiet weekend. This past weekend was half quiet and half busy. It was nice. With Wifey™ working all weekend, I made plans to take care of some things that I’d been putting off on Saturday and then spend Sunday relaxing.

Saturday I finished putting up shelves at my mom’s house. She’s never used the garage to park her car, so recently she turned half of it into a small office/sewing room. It looks nice. She had it drywalled, we put flooring in and she had some cabinets installed with a working sink, a microwave and a small refrigerator. I swear you could live out there. So anyway, I installed the shelving over the desk area. Normall that wouldn’t take all day, but we’re talking about my mom here.

See, I’ll get there at 8 and we’ll head to Home Depot for wood and not leave the store until about 11. She has to go up and down EVERY aisle. Then we’ll get home with the wood and, of course, now it’s lunch time. Can’t miss lunch. I can go all day without eating, but no one else can. So, to say the least, I didn’t get started on the shelves until about 1PM. And that’s how it can take all day to build some simple shelves.

Sunday was more restful. I basically spent most of the day fixing my sliding compound miter saw. The story on the saw is that I bought it when we were moving into the new house, because of all the trim work we’d be doing. So for the first couple of days, everything worked out fine and then by day three or so, the saw just died. Since we were crunched for time to get the house done before the movers arrived, I just stuck the saw under the table and rented one from Home Depot.

Fast forward four months and I pulled the saw out, loaded it into the car and brought it to a tool repair place. Unfortunately, they couldn’t do much to help me because it’s not a brand that they support, meaning they wouldn’t be able to get parts for it. The guy did say that more than likely it was just the cord or the switch… but that’s the extent of the advice he gave me. He also said I could pay them a lot of money to take a look at it and tell me what was wrong with it… but they still probably wouldn’t be able to fix it. Erm.

With that I brought it home, took out my screwdrivers and took that shit apart. My feeling at that point, was that I really didn’t have much to lose. It’s already not working, so the worse thing that would happen is that it’d still be not working when I put it back together. After opening it up and seeing what was inside, I headed over to Lowes to get a new cord and an off the shelf switch. I changed the cord and the machine was still dead. The switch I bought was totally different than what was in there, but I rigged it so it would work and when I plugged it in I heard some signs of life. So, after messing with a million different combinations of where to attach the electrical wires… I got it to work. The only thing that worried me throughout all of this is that I’d plug it in and it would explode. I’ve never feared working with electricity… except for the fact that you could get shocked and die. I’ve gotten shocked a few times. It’s a weird feeling. Kind of a fuzzy feeling. Ugh. Anyhow, my saw works again and now I’m eager to start on finished some of the trim work.

But that will have to wait for another weekend. This coming weekend it’s off to an amusement park, I think it’s called “Six Flags Great America” these days. It’s gone through so many name changes it’s hard to keep track.

[Ed. Note: These entries always generate questions about the song in the commericials, so I’ve linked the album below… the song is called “We like to party”.]

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