hey mister congenial-looking black man, record a show for me

i don't understand what the congenial-looking black man (mr. CLBM for short) means when he outlines what i'll "love about directv dvr" ...

see, mr. CLBM, we just got our directv with dvr -- which is just tivo -- activated yesterday. and it's pretty; it's shiny and silver and looks very, shall we say, powerbook-ish behind the glass in our entertainment console.

the only problem: it seems to fucking record random programs. programs i did not ask it to record, and unless frijolita mixed a few spoonfuls of Cremora brand Creamer with Crack in my morning coffee, programs i would never in a million years record.

such as cooley high. and some eric stoltz movie that i've never heard of before. why, mr. CLBM, would i love some sort of ipod shuffle action with all one billion channels you offer me.

some days, it's as if technology is giving me the finger.

***

other days, though, it's the entire home improvement industry that flips me off.

take, for example, what happened at the homestead while f and i were galavanting across western europe. we had a little flood in our back yard, as lake eponymous decided that it couldn't deal with a five-inch deluge one sunday night. water came up to our back porch, about 200 feet away from its banks.

there also was a lightning strike at or near our house, as it blew up the outlets in our basement and garage, killed all devices plugged into phone lines (and damaged one of our two lines itself), totally fried my cable modem and wireless router, blew up our sprinkler system and the electric eyes on the garage door, and ruined my old powerbook G3, which was plugged directly into the wall.

well.

the sane part of my brain said "get several highly-paid experts in here to fix all this," while the insane part said "dood -- you can totally fix all this shit." i think f was listening to the insane part, because each time the sane part decided to speak its mind out loud, she had this "who farted?" look on her face that told me her true thoughts about her husband's piss-poor home improvement skills.

long story short, we got an electrician neighbor to fix the basement outlets, and he's still poking around the garage to find out what's wrong out there ... we canned the tivo and got directv ... we upgraded the router and modem, but decided to get DSL about a week later ... and i fixed the electric eyes on the garage door.

that was a major triumph. that day, i put up shelves in f's office, then fixed the electric eye, then mowed the grass around the house where the flood had deposited all our expensive mulch, and decided that, because i was on a roll, i would tackle the largest project to date:

putting our storm door back on the front of the house.

see, it had blown off a few times, because when my father in law and i put it up, we were high on that Cremora Crack stuff and did a horrible job -- so horrible, in fact, that we decided that one of the most important parts of the door (the plunger thingee that makes it automatically close) would cause us to totally deplete what little home improvement skills we had left.

well, of course, the wind blew the door totally open so many times that it pulled the wood jamb completely off the door frame and, voila, one day i come home and the f tells me the freaking door fell off.

i let it sit for a few weeks, contemplating what to do. the sane part of my brain said "call a qualified professional TODAY" but the insane part, in cahoots with my lovely wife, made me feel like a (insert word for female genitalia) for not being able to hang up a simple little door.

***

so i decided to do it. i went to the local ACE hardware and the friendly hardware man said "son, use gorilla glue to make sure the wood never ever leaves the door frame again." i bought me some glue, waited more than a week for someone to come to their senses and call in the Bob Vila House Fixer-Upper Squad, and, since nobody thought that was a good idea, i decided to cap off my incredibly fruitful sunday with hanging a door.

long story short: i applied liberal amounts of glue to the wood, put the wood to the frame, pounded it in, waited for it to dry ...

and then realized i put the wood up crooked.

rule number 1 in home improvement: do not glue your mistakes to the frame of the house.