Tool Time

A few weeks ago, my darling boy yanked the kitchen phone's cord, which connected to the wall via a plastic connection in a metal frame (made for a wall-mount phone) ; the plastic did not resist the boy tugging on it with all of his almost 30 pounds and a piece of plastic holding the cord in the socket snapped off. And the phone wouldn't stay plugged in without a small quantity of packing tape.

So...I went to ACE Hardware, home of the helpful hardware man, who must've been on a coffee break and was replaced by the idiot, pimply-faced adolescent hardware man wannabe who pointed me to a $5.98 replacement - not an exact copy the part (which I dutifully brought along in my Teutonic "I want one JUST LIKE THIS" mode). Once home, with screwdriver in hand, I found that the nitwit had steered me to a connector with SIX wires and in the wall was FOUR wires, so once all was said and done, screwed and connected, there was still no dial tone. May his face remain a festering topographical map of the Rocky Mountains well into his twenties.

So...a few more days go by, and Micah and I went to Home Depot on our Monday shopping rounds. I wanted the above-mentioned thing for the phone and a winder-up thingy for the garden hose, which had been sitting on our front walk like a trip-and-fall lawsuit waiting to happen. This time I found a phone wall receptacle, manufactured by GE, which definitely brings good things to life because the packaging was transparent so I could easily see that there was a red wire, a green wire, a yellow wire, and a black wire - all for the bargain price of $4.99. We went home and the screwdriver came back out and lo and behold, the phone works. I am so proud of myself, therefore I'll keep the story of how much I hate the Self-Checkout at Home Depot and the bad words that I said over what was an amazingly slow and time-consuming pain in the rear of a process to myself.

So...Micah's tab is now one toilet and one phone receptacle, so his first five years or so of allowance is basically a big IOU. His tab stands at about $500+. Plus time lost for two ER visits.

Photos to follow - I've go to put them on the computer first. Another day, I am done. I brought the kids' medical charts home tonight to put their immunization histories into their medical records - now I just need to find my immunization history and fill in all the dates and shots.