Please excuse my son’s absence

Greetings all, I’m sure everyone has stopped visiting the site because of my recent inactivity, but I assure you, I have a valid excuse…well, maybe not. The past few weeks has been fraught with events that make tabloid journalist drool with unforgiving fervor. Me? Exaggerate? Why I’d never hear of such a thing.

The week we bought the trailer, our house became reminiscent of Europe’s Black Plague with my daughter getting sick with pink eye and strep. Those of you with children can imagine the joy of using antibiotic eye drops on an 18-month child with a fever of 103. Towards the end of my daughter’s bout with the demented sand man, my son came down with some random wonton virus that stole the weekend. Through this, my wife got sick with something or other and thanks to vitamin C supplements I skated the scourge attacking our house. It was all pumpernickel and daisies however; since I was the only healthy one in the family you can imagine my family obligations.

During my wife’s hiatus from her standard fare of motherhood, she was able to focus on more important things…like the lack of a ceiling fan in our bedroom and so the honey-do list grew by another.

Nothing is ever as simple or as difficult as it seems in the beginning and the ceiling fan was no exception. To keep a long story relatively short, I’ll simply summarize the steps to installing a ceiling fan:

• Choose ceiling fan
  
• Remove current light fixture
  
• Buy Romex 3 wire electrical wiring (standard 2 wire electrical only supports light, not light and fan from light switch)
  
• Pull old wiring out
  
• Run new wire through attic and down wall to switch housing
  
• Realize insufficient bracing for ceiling fan
  
• Buy brace for ceiling fan
  
• Realize brace when spanned over 16 inches is no longer sufficient to support ceiling fan (building codes allow for 24inch on center construction for roof trusses)
  
• Buy 2x4 and cut to 22 and a half inches
  
• Hammer new brace between rafters
  
• Attach electrical box
  
• Open ceiling fan box and find the hole cut in ceiling is to large for the new fan mount
  
• Cut new opening
  
• Pull out brace and relocate it to new opening
  
• Wire up ceiling fan (one line does NOT do this justice)
  
• Hang ceiling fan
  
• Try and force all electrical connections into a space a hamster would consider cramped
  
• Test ceiling fan
  
• Buy heart defibrillator when heart stops because the lights don’t come on
  
• Heart begins when wife discovers a little switch at the bottom of switch to turn on lights
  
• Balance the blades
  
• Mark 4 nights of life lost off of calendar because of ceiling fan and wonder if you could have made do with Egyptian eunuchs fanning you with palm leaves
  
• Plan patching of the too big hole in the ceiling
  
• Determine what color the bedroom will be painted (since you have to paint the patch, wouldn’t it make sense to paint the whole room?)
  

Well, it wasn’t that short after all; you can imagine what the non-condensed version looked like…I can.

So now you all can understand the reason for my “vacation” and my apologies. It appears that I’m back…for the time being.

Electrical, carpentry, dry wall…I’m gonna start my own home improvement show…watch for me on HGTV.