I am not a carpenter aunt. (MMP)

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

Nor am I a carpenter uncle. In fact carpenters everywhere are loath to be seen in the same world with me. Postmen, by association, despise me.

This weekend I was down south visiting my brother, his wife, and by itty bitty little WelbyNephew. My brother, knowing I was taking a few days off to relax, asked me to help him do a little remodeling in WelbyNephew’s room. Nothing big, just replace a little bit of drywall, build a desk into the wall, fun manly stuff that included hot wings and beer.

It was only supposed to be a morning thing. It’s not like we were going to build a deck or something. So the two of us plus a couple of friends got together for a day of Manly Carpentry Work. (Anyone else hear the theme song to Gilligan’s Island?)

Perhaps my measuring eye was off. Perhaps my hammer aim was a little out of kilter. (What is a kilter, anyway and why would I want to be in a kilter in the first place?) Perhaps we shouldn’t have started drinking beer at 6 AM. I’m not sure about that last one. Beer can’t affect your carpentry skills in a negative way, obviously, or the guy I hired to redo our kitchen cabinets at the Welbyhouse would have never gotten anything done.

I’m not sure of anything other than the beer information and the fact that I managed to accomplish the following things in less time than it takes little WelbyNephew to fill up a diaper:

  1. Put a hole in the one piece of drywall that wasn’t supposed to be replaced. Not a little hole, oh no, a big gaping hole. See there was a hammer, and since we were ripping down all the drywall Welbybro and I decided that it would be cool to smash some of the drywall with the hammer. We’re still juvenile that way. Every man has a little bit of the “Og Smash!” in him. My inner Og just got a little carried away.

Perfectly trim, place and set a piece of drywall.

Remove same and locate where on the drywall I needed to put the hole for the electrical outlet.

Locate the water pipe that ran into the guest bath. At least it was behind the piece of drywall that somebody was conscientious enough to check up. If no one had checked it that pipe could have gone undisturbed and leak-free for years.

Take a lunch break while the rest of them worked. More of a breakfast break, really, since I was eating a bagel.

Drop a drill on the head of one of the assistant not-carpenters.

Get kicked out of the room by assistant not-carpenter and relegated to cooler duty.

At this point WelbyNephew needed a change. Not that I did it. I pride myself on never having changed a diaper. My heart doesn’t stand still when “Da Doo Run Run.”

So what’s the moral of this story? What’s the point? There isn’t one. This is, after all, a MMP.

-welby (Not Rue)

#2

Quite good, actually. I’m somewhat surprised.

I think you’ve captured Rue’s style well, and made a coherent topic seem like disjointed rambling. Or made disjointed rambling semm like a coherent topic, whichever.

If you’d just called your brother “Skippy” it would have been perfect.

#3

Not bad, but you’ve got to come up with better pseudonyms for your relatives.

#4

This is why I only give my assistants beer after the work is done!

They can eat all they want while they toil but no beer until I have results :slight_smile:

#5

Well, I’m surprise too Exgineer. I figured you’d just make fun of me. Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to call my brother “Skippy”, though his nickname growing up was the remarkably similar “Scooter.” I’m glad to hear that I’m disjointedly coherent.

Shibb, I can understand that. I really can. But dammit, I’m just not that craetive. Sniff. Sniff.

Tanookie, I think that Scooter (Happy now Ex? Shibb?)learned his lesson. I imagine that’ll be the last time he wakes me up by handing me a beer.

I am a little worried that FCM hasn’t been in yet. Obviously I’m not enough like Rue.

-welby (naming names)

#6

Huff! You’re obviously not missing me, so I think the proper thing to do would be to ignore your Rueful MMP, not post, then skeedadle back over to Cafe Society, where they adore me.

Whoops.
:smiley:

Kiss to welby. Good job!

#7

Aw crap. Did I really forget to make fun of you?

I was going to relate an incident involving power tools, beer, and how I ended up wishing I was wearing a diaper, but I thought better of it. I’m not taking any chances.

'Cause if anybody is going to be made fun of in this thread, it’s going to be welby.

#8

Well(by), If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning.
You get an excellent on the Rue scale, which I believe is digital because Rue likes cool toys. Or at least that what I heard. It might have been that Rue likes school boys. Who knows with Rue.

#9

I’ve always had the impression that the only tots Rue likes are the Rue-tots. Only one of them is in school, so Rue might like a schoolboy, but not schoolboys. Unless it’s the cookies. Ya’know, the chocolate topped ones. He probably likes those.

#10

[hijack]
I just found out I’m going to win the schools Woodworking award. You know why? Because I didn’t put holes in anything that I wasn’t supposed too. :DOh, and of course, there was the bedside table, and the knitting needles, and the box, and the other box that AI made, and then there was the whole getting my woods teacher a birthday present…

[/hijack]

I once dropped a pneumatic nail gun on someone’s foot. But that was on purpose.

#11

welby, you have to go to super special carpenter’s school to learn the secret of being continually buzzed on beer and using a hammer at the same time. I think that’s where they also learn how to always have a freshly lit cigarette hangin’ out of their mouths at all times. I’ve never seen a carpenter without a freshly lit cigarette hangin’ outta his mouth. Where did the drywall come from? Seems around here they like to get it from Lowe’s, tho Home Depot does its share of drywall sales too. It just seems that every time I am in Lowe’s, there are people lined up to buy drywall. So, I been kinda wonderin’ if (ok, actually I just started thinkin’ about this after reading your op, which is by the way very Rueful and Ruesque,) Lowe’s drywall has that certain drywall goodness that carpenter’s seek.

  • swampbear
    ( who’s been sitting in a meeting all day and now has a numb butt)
#12

So, you didn’t say; has the pipe leaked yet?

I’ll give your post a 9. I really think it was about an 8.5, but I am compensating for the German judge, who always scores low.

#13

Um I was thinking about the waterpipe too! I mean really if you are going for calamity what is more fun than flooding scooter’s house? All that foreshadowing of the leaking and not a drop to be found :frowning:

Then again I may just be jealous… I have no bathroom sink as we had to replace a ton of drywall this weekend to make up for the fact that the previous owners of casa tanookie seemed to not heed the dry in drywall and overflowed the sink and tub on numerous occasions so as to cause said no-longer-dry-wall to rot and turn black then covered it with wallpaper!

So this week we play sand and fill… well not really we… just he (the hubby otherwise known as parallax) I get to heckle. That’s my offical job… well I don’t get paid for it per se but…

What was I saying again? Oh well what’s a rue inspired MMP without a little hijacking anyway. Or a lot of hijacking … or…

#14

No one missed me, either! And after all that flirting and stuff! Hmmph. Hmmph, I say.

Good post. Very good Rue-emulation, except you have to have at leastone joined-together word because you used italicsand forgotto put spaces in. :smiley:

#15

What’s really fun is to impress your young son by punching holes through drywall with your fist. Of course, if you miscalculate and put your fist through the drywall and hit a 2x4 stud, then great agony ensues, accompanied by young son hilarity. It’s always good to amuse a child, though.

#16

The OP just reinforces why I prefer to work alone. :slight_smile:

I’ll accept help on large projects (a fence replacement job a few years ago springs to mind) but unfortunately my most able helper (my father) isn’t quite as able anymore. :frowning:

#17

Welby, introducing an Uncle Scooter shores the whole thing up quite nicely. I’d also recommended bizarre-cute names for the Welby offspring, as well as Mrs. Welby, MD. Then you move up into the rarified air. I’d help you but the best I can come up with for the Shibbletts is The Girl and The Boy. Not terribly original, but that’s how we refer to them at home. We also call the boy Mr. C.

Mr. C and I had a guys bonding night on Friday while Mrs. ShibbOleth and Ms. A went to her Open House/Ice Cream social at school. The Boy had soccer practice, then he feigned hunger to get me to buy him a slice of pepperoni at Cosimos (sp?). After this I bought a quarter pound of licorice bridge mix, to cure my craving for licorice, and then we walked around the mall a bit. We don’t actually get to the mall very often even though our area is lousy with them, especially when the weather is bearable. So on this walk we were surpised (at least I was surprised, I don’t know that anything really surprises the boy. Or maybe it’s better to say that he’s young enough (five) that everythingsurprise him, so it’s quite hard to know if it’s something new or just something he doesn’t entirely recall that he’d already experienced… but I digress) by a children’s shoe store that we didn’t know was there. Since the whole family had spent the previous weekend looking for children’s shoes, with only moderate success, it was a little disappointing to find kid’s sandals for $9.99 when I thought we’d done very well at Kohl’s for $14.99. I should remark here that I also expected Kohl’s to be spelled C-o-l-e-'s, but they went for the German spelling. So maybe I’m as easily surprised as the boy. Anyway, here was a cool little kid’s shoe store right in front of us. Plus they had it tricked up with lot’s of neat googaws to grab the attention of any passing tot. Not that the googaws are central to the story, but any chance to use the word “googaws” in a sentence should not be passed upon. Where was I? Oh, yes, sandwiched cunningly between the Spiderman sandals was a pair of oh-so-cool-if-you’re-a-five-year-old-boy Batman sneakers. Slip-ons, no less. Now I’m nothing if not extravagant when it comes to my children’s feet, and the Boy’s old zip-ups were anyway on they’re last legs. So he tried on a couple of sizes, and then I did the “run down the length of the store and see if you bloody your nose by tripping over the slightly too big sneakers” test, which he passed marvelously. Only $23 lighter did I leave the store, and that included the try on socks and a whole passle of stickers and tattoos. After the Boy showed off his new kicks to all and sundry, we made our way over to Graeter’s.

I should mention that Graeter’s is the reason we were able to skip the ice cream social with nary a peep from the Boy. I was hep to them changing the Flavor of the Month on Sunday, and the current FotM was Strawberry Chip. Since the Boy is a Strawberry fiend, and he’d been getting smiley faces in school all week, a treat of a dish was certainly in order. I decided to go decadent and we had the Strawberry Chip / Hot Fudge combo, which was jake with the Boy. I gave him a bite, then tried a small fatherly taste. After that I just gave him the dish and the spoon so that he could have at it. So he took another bite then scooped up a spoonful, but offered it to me. This is just the sort of thing that I love about him, he always thinks about others and shares without needing to be reminded.

Well, that was just Friday night, and this is getting very long. I won’t go into Saturday’s soccer and Summerbration, or the Sunday birthday party (not ours) and Summerfair (art’s show). It’s even possible that Rue was down at Summerfair, although I didn’t see him. We did make a couple of birdhouses there, which is carpentry of a sort, and links back to the OP. I just need to bring them up to Code and then we’ll be ready to move some bird families in there.

  • Shibb
#18

[stupid question]

What’s the “MMP” in the thread title mean?

[/stupid question]

#19

welby FairyChatMom’s FIL had several heart bypasses this morning. That’s why we haven’t heard from her today. Just so ya know, she ain’t ignoring ya, just kinda preoccupied right now.

Pool Update:

swampy/Angel Pants is kinda po’d. Well, I was but I got a little better. The tree guy didn’t show up today like he was supposed to. However, he did call and said that another job he was doing took longer than he thought and that he would be here at 8:30 am tomorrow. So, I got less po’d cause at least he called and apologized and all. But, he best be here tomorrow. Even if he has to walk and carry all his tree gettin’ rid of equipment, he best be here. Bet that’d be hard to walk and carry a buncha tree gettin’ rid of stuff. Course there’s also this slight problem, that being the storage building delivery guy is supposed to be here around eleven tomorrow morning to deliver my new storage building. Tree guy is just gonna have to make allowance for storage building guy. I know how storage building guy has to bring in the storage building, so tree guy is just gonna have to not be in that area until after storage building guy does his delivery thing. Ain’t my fault tree guy didn’t get here today.

Let’s see, I’m having trees cut down, a storage building delivered, a pool put in and a privacy fence put up. I kinda feel like I’m doing my part to stimulate the economy. I’m so proud.

-swampbear
(Patriotic 'Merkin stimulating the economy, at least for tree, storage building, pool and fence people)

#20

welby, darlin, I had a good reason for not posting this morning, so don’t get your panties in a wad! On preview, I see swampy got here ahead of me. :smiley: And I have to say that the only thing keeping you OP from being truly Rue-esque was not naming Scooter right off. But you’re new at this, so you’ll learn. It was a great story, well told, and I shall make a note not to allow you in my house with a hammer. Especially if there’s beer.

Mr. Hand - MMP=Monday Morning Post - which is Rue’s name for his, um, Monday Morning Post.