A beautiful, sunny day in Canberra for the first day of spring! It’s even warm enough for me to sit here typing in my Superman t-shirt! No jumpers today although I daresay it will start to get cool again as the day winds down.
ACT teachers are striking today so I have Megan here at home with me and a squad of teenage girls about to arrive to ensconce themselves for the day! I asked Megan if I was to be banished to my room but she is gracious enough to let me come out whilst her friends are here.
I didn’t really get much say in it. I was just told they were coming and I instinctively knew that any protestations about my “Fortress of Solitude” being stormed would come to nought so I just took it on the chin. It’s sad when you realise that you have very limited power in your own house, haha. Damn you ACT teachers!
I got one job out of the way yesterday which has been a burden to me for some time. Our front wooden door has a round knob and a deadlock which is a bit tricky and we have had a lot of trouble with it. I had a locksmith here a while back who told me this very expensive lock was actually a heap of rubbish! When it started to play up again last week I thought we may be up for a new one.
Now anyone who knows me well will be aware that Do-it-Yourself is not exactly my forte. I seem to be all thumbs when it comes to fixing anything remotely difficult and I hate going to hardware stores and asking for instructions from experts who I feel sure are really thinking to themselves, “what a loser” despite their seemingly good intentions and advice.
Of course in reality they aren’t really doing that, just trying to help and my own failure at manly practices really comes down to a lack of interest and dare I say it laziness! Luckily my father is a retired carpenter who I can call on to lend his expertise to our household.
Now I am fully capable of taking this particular doorknob off and have done so in the past but seeing it was not turning properly and was in need of examination I thought I had better get someone who had a better idea of the mechanics of the thing than I do to look at it. It would really have made my day to get it off then not be able to get it back on again!
So my father came around and had the knob off in a flash and we identified where the problem was although we couldn’t come up with an answer for why it was doing it. He then proceeded to pull the whole thing apart and of course when he tried to put it back together there was a little piece of metal that needed to go back into the deadlock that he couldn’t refit! Try as he might he couldn’t figure out where this particular piece was supposed to go. So it was quickly decided by unanimous decision that a new lock was the order of the day!
$164 later and we were home with a brand spanking new doorknob, pulled out of the packet and it was on in no time at all. The only problem was that it wouldn’t work properly! When you lock the door from the inside it was meant to unlock when you turned the knob but this wasn’t happening. It did cross my mind that there was probably just a step in the installation that we had missed that was causing this problem and actually handed my father the instructions that had come in the packet but he was adamant that he didn’t need them and they lay on the floor under his feet as he took off and put on the doorknob time and time again whilst getting increasingly frustrated by his inability to get it to work properly. I didn’t think by this time that it was a good idea to suggest that he have a look at the instructions so I kept my own council and as it was getting near time to go to work I went and had a shower.
Thankfully on getting out of the shower and dressing for work I found that the doorknob was now fitted and everything was working perfectly. When I inquired as to what the problem was it turns out that it was just a small step that he had missed. Three hours of work had come down to one small step that was missing!
I pondered on it later that I probably could have done it all myself but if I had struggled with it over that length of time I probably would have gotten incredibly frustrated and considered myself a failure. That someone who had some idea what they were doing had struggled with it as badly as I would have was rather ironic. Although I may have given up and called Dad around anyway, haha.
So now the new doorknob is on and working well and it is time to move onto the next job.
ACT teachers are striking today so I have Megan here at home with me and a squad of teenage girls about to arrive to ensconce themselves for the day! I asked Megan if I was to be banished to my room but she is gracious enough to let me come out whilst her friends are here.
I didn’t really get much say in it. I was just told they were coming and I instinctively knew that any protestations about my “Fortress of Solitude” being stormed would come to nought so I just took it on the chin. It’s sad when you realise that you have very limited power in your own house, haha. Damn you ACT teachers!
I got one job out of the way yesterday which has been a burden to me for some time. Our front wooden door has a round knob and a deadlock which is a bit tricky and we have had a lot of trouble with it. I had a locksmith here a while back who told me this very expensive lock was actually a heap of rubbish! When it started to play up again last week I thought we may be up for a new one.
Now anyone who knows me well will be aware that Do-it-Yourself is not exactly my forte. I seem to be all thumbs when it comes to fixing anything remotely difficult and I hate going to hardware stores and asking for instructions from experts who I feel sure are really thinking to themselves, “what a loser” despite their seemingly good intentions and advice.
Of course in reality they aren’t really doing that, just trying to help and my own failure at manly practices really comes down to a lack of interest and dare I say it laziness! Luckily my father is a retired carpenter who I can call on to lend his expertise to our household.
Now I am fully capable of taking this particular doorknob off and have done so in the past but seeing it was not turning properly and was in need of examination I thought I had better get someone who had a better idea of the mechanics of the thing than I do to look at it. It would really have made my day to get it off then not be able to get it back on again!
So my father came around and had the knob off in a flash and we identified where the problem was although we couldn’t come up with an answer for why it was doing it. He then proceeded to pull the whole thing apart and of course when he tried to put it back together there was a little piece of metal that needed to go back into the deadlock that he couldn’t refit! Try as he might he couldn’t figure out where this particular piece was supposed to go. So it was quickly decided by unanimous decision that a new lock was the order of the day!
$164 later and we were home with a brand spanking new doorknob, pulled out of the packet and it was on in no time at all. The only problem was that it wouldn’t work properly! When you lock the door from the inside it was meant to unlock when you turned the knob but this wasn’t happening. It did cross my mind that there was probably just a step in the installation that we had missed that was causing this problem and actually handed my father the instructions that had come in the packet but he was adamant that he didn’t need them and they lay on the floor under his feet as he took off and put on the doorknob time and time again whilst getting increasingly frustrated by his inability to get it to work properly. I didn’t think by this time that it was a good idea to suggest that he have a look at the instructions so I kept my own council and as it was getting near time to go to work I went and had a shower.
Thankfully on getting out of the shower and dressing for work I found that the doorknob was now fitted and everything was working perfectly. When I inquired as to what the problem was it turns out that it was just a small step that he had missed. Three hours of work had come down to one small step that was missing!
I pondered on it later that I probably could have done it all myself but if I had struggled with it over that length of time I probably would have gotten incredibly frustrated and considered myself a failure. That someone who had some idea what they were doing had struggled with it as badly as I would have was rather ironic. Although I may have given up and called Dad around anyway, haha.
So now the new doorknob is on and working well and it is time to move onto the next job.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 