So we bought a radial arm saw and a reciprocating saw. We bought several circular saws because he kept wearing the things out.
We bought a band saw, a scroll saw, a saber saw, a table saw, a miter saw, some hacksaws of different sizes and, just to prove we are made of the right stuff, we bought a good old-fashioned, ordinary hand
saw.We have saws. We have hammers -- several different types -- we have shop vacs and rolling tool chests, we have stud finders and drills and nail guns and drill presses and belt sanders and beltless
sanders and compressors. We have wrenches monkey and wrenches plain. We have socket sets and screwdrivers in sizes ranging from microscopic to King Kong. We have nails, we have screws, we have nuts and bolts
galore. We are to tools what Imelda Marcos is to shoes (yes, I am stuck in that analogy).
In other words, my friend, "We Got Tools". And we know how to use them, too. Or most of the time.
My husband is
good with tools. But like all handymen, he's pounded himself with a hammer a few zillion times and has a tendency to forget to turn off the electricity when messing with things electrical (which has served
to educate our children to the depth and breadth of their father's knowledge of colorful language). And once he even managed to run a power saw across his hand. I, the resident, middle-aged "Tooltime Matron"
of the household, have remained fairly intact because, unlike my spouse, I know that something designed to chop wood in half should not be applied to mere human flesh. And even when I do end up nursing a
construction injury, it's not of my own infliction.
Case in point: We were putting a deck on the house mentioned above when my hubby called for me to help him. He had a warped decking board and he wanted
me to straighten it out while he nailed it. Yeah, right. It didn't take long for us to conclude that arrangement wasn't going to work. So he said, "You hold the nail while I hold the decking board and drive
the nail in with the hammer." I looked at his bandaid-covered fingers.
"You've smacked your own fingers with a hammer 25 times today and you expect me to hold a nail so you can pound it in? Ha!" This mama
wasn't born yesterday.
"Can you hold a warped decking board straight?" He shot back. OK -- so he had me. And I have no one to blame but myself. I held the nail and, just like death and taxes, the
inevitable happened. He smacked my fingers with the hammer. I have no one to blame but myself.
After all, it doesn't take Imelda Marcos to point out that if you stand in the middle of a highway
during rush hour, eventually you're going to end up as a hood ornament.
