Done, not done

Well the lawn mower still isn't running. Everything went back together just fine, but as soon as you drop the deck to engage the blades the whole thing comes to a grinding halt. I was told to check the path of the belts and they looked exactly like the illustrations in the manual so I'm not sure what to do. I was just so disheartened to have it not work the first time and we were hot and sweaty and hot so we left it for another day. Maybe that other day should be tomorrow and perhaps after having left it alone for a while, I will instantly see what is wrong.

Today we finished up the deck rails. The missus visited some friends in Wisconsin and came back raving about how nicely the rails on their deck were finished with a top rail. Rather than listen to her bitch for the next six months about how we need to do that with our deck I've opted to get 'er done. After all, I do have a table saw...

She measured and bought the boards. We still have stain left over from when we stained the house a couple of years ago. The guy at h*o*m*e d*e*p*o*t sold her some fancy-schmancy screws with a special square bit. I don't have the upper body strength to get the fancy screws to countersink so I've secretly replaced the expensive screws with the old fashioned kind that actually work! I had a little trouble with cutting the angles at first. It seems that whatever direction I think the 45 degree angle should be cut at I am wrong and should do the opposite. This is why girls suck at geometry. It doesn't make sense to our minds.

We only wasted one 3 foot piece and it was doubly painful because it was only 1 inch short of being long enough to use on another section. The longer pieces are a pain in the ass to cut because getting one person that's eight feet away from the saw to feed the board towards the saw without tweaking it out of line with the blade is almost impossible. Still we did pretty good for a couple of novices and next weekend we'll tackle the other deck.

Other than that things are as fine as they've been for the past year. We took a small vacation to Lake of the Ozarks which was nice but ended on a sour note. Maybe we just aren't meant to be together forever.