Showing 1 - 4 of 4 posts found matching keyword: oops

Remember my most recent poodle strip, where I depicted the dogs destroying the house while I was out? Mom was worried that I was trying to warn her that my dogs had destroyed something. Well, life imitates art.

That lamp had it coming.

I'm sure my girls didn't mean it, and it was just an accident that one of them bumped the table in their excitement when they saw me coming home. I mean, there's no way they were playing ball in the house. We've spoken about that, multiple times. They know better than to play ball in the house, don't you girls? That's right.

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Returning to my neighborhood following an errand yesterday, I was surprised to see a single woman walking an entire pack of dogs down the street. As I approached, I noticed that two of the dogs were standard poodles, one white and one black. Those sure look like my dogs, I thought. It turns out that they were.

As I stopped the Jeep, I could see that the woman was walking her black Labrador on a leash. Following her were several dogs of various sizes. All wore collars, but none wore a leash. And all of them belonged to my family. I asked the lady, "What are you doing with my dogs?"

Her response was simply, "I figured they must belong to somebody." Unless she knows some way to teach poodles to groom themselves, that's a pretty safe assumption.

My July and Victoria quickly recognized me and willingly jumped into my car. (Although I think they probably would have jumped into just about anyone's car. They love car rides.) Leslie's two dogs were next: Charlie accepted my help up into the Jeep, but Rudy, recognizing my intent, sprinted back home at top speed, refusing to surrender his new found freedom.

I eventually returned home and wrangled the mass back into my yard. It turns out that my mother and brother had put the animals in the yard mere minutes earlier, unaware that the gate to the driveway had been left open. They both got a piece of my mind -- a loud, angry piece.

At least no one was lost or hurt. And the dogs got a taste of adventure. Hopefully, it was enough to last them a lifetime, because I don't plan to duplicate that mistake.

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My poodles are typically so well behaved, but every once in awhile they lose their heads. Or at least someone's head.

You should have seen the other doll.

What you see above is all that remains of a Bradley cloth doll that my now deceased grandmother bought my mother in the late 1960s. Mom had kept it on a counter in the dining room, but that's no obstacle to a determined poodle. I have idea where the head ended up. Most people seem to like the big eyes of these Bradley Dolls, but I guess that Victoria didn't.

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After my mother chewed me out for my niggardly approach to home repair, I got off my bum and tore the cabinets out of the kitchen. This necessary work had been much delayed, party because I'm lazy, and partly because it was really a two-man job. If you've ever read any of my other DIY exploits, you can probably begin to guess where this is going.

The kitchen cabinets were low-quality to begin with, and over the years they had begin to come apart. More than one cabinet door had fallen off over time as the hinges succumbed to metal fatigue. When a shiftless computer programmer rips a cabinet door off its hinge, either the last Coca-Cola in the house is behind that door, or it's time to replace the cabinets.

Trey had helped me take down the first two cabinets a few months ago. That operation had taken a considerable amount of blood and sweat, and had resulted in a pizza-sized hole in the wall. Alone, I was determined to be more careful with the 6 remaining cabinets and keep the walls intact. So the first thing I did was scratch the kitchen floor while moving the island out of the way for the safety ladder.

It quickly became apparent that the remaining cabinets weren't going to come off any easier than the first two. After 20 careful minutes with a drill, packing knife, hammer, and pry bar, I finally had a cabinet off the wall with no major structural damage to the wall, the cabinet, or me. The next cabinet was no easier. The third harder still. So much caulk had been used on installation, these suckers were practically glued to the wall. Mistake number one: never trust anything that was installed by someone who uses caulk like glue.

The fourth cabinet was potentially dangerous. It hung over the stove and had live electrical wires where the wall-mounted microwave had once been. (That microwave had died years earlier and long been removed to the garbage dump.) I carefully taped off the wire and unmounted the electrical box that had been installed inside the cabinet. I also removed the sheet metal screws holding the stove's exhaust vent in place. However, I still had to access the crawl space behind the bathroom upstairs to gently remove the exhaust pipe without damaging the exhaust vent on the roof, a vent which only last month I had repaired from leaking in the rain. No sooner had I fully dislodged the exhaust pipe than I heard a tremendous crash below me. I was holding the pipe, but someone should have been holding the cabinet.

When I extricated myself from the crawlspace and rushed downstairs (accompanied by my repeated and inventive profanity-laden exclaimations), I found what I expected: the cabinet had crashed down onto the range. It turns out that the exhaust pipe had been the only thing holding the cabinet in place. The caulk that had acted as cement for all the other cabinets had been destroyed by the now-repaired leak in the roof. The one cabinet that could really damage something if it fell had fallen and damaged something.

And I had planned on eating spaghetti tonight.

The glass range top was smashed, and the oven, the one large appliance in the kitchen that worked perfectly was now destroyed. Fortunately, the electrical wires weren't damaged in the fall. I could begin cleaning up without worrying about electrocution. And while I did immediately proceed to slice my finger open while cleaning up the mess, it wasn't on a piece of giant jagged glass, but on a small rusty nail. So thank goodness for that.

Naturally, the two remaining cabinets were the hardest of all to remove. I even had to smash the final cabinet above the refrigerator into its component pieces with a hammer to separate it from all the caulk and stripped screws holding it place. By the end, I did not for a minute worry about saving the wall.

If there is a moral to this story, I suspect that it's this: never do what your mother tells you. Either way you'll doom yourself to a future of cold dinners, so you might as well just avoid all that work.

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To be continued...

 

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