Happy New Year!

We hope 2005 brings you health and happiness.

The New Year for us has been a time for planning and starting a few DIY jobs. I started on Jan 1st by putting a pair of scissors through my thumb and out the other side. The resulted in lots of blood and cussing. The good news was that when it came time to dress the wound(s) we had a pair of scissors handy to cut the bandage tape.

On to Sunday, and I decided to put up some more shelves. This required the purchase of said shelves from the DIY store along with a Black and Decker Workmate on which to cut the shelves to size. Assembling the workmate proved to be a DIY task in itself. The instructions were grossly misleading and I found I had hammered two retaining pins into the device before fitting the handles. Result: A vice with no handles and no way to get the pins out to put the handles on. A quick call to my father-in-law confirmed my suspicions: Once you hammer retaining pins in you can never, ever get them out again. I thought hard and concluded that if I could not remove the pins I would have to hack the handles. The hours that I whiled away in my childhood poking my mothers knitting needles into the gas fire and burning holes in plastic with them finally paid off: I hacked the handles by burning through them with a soldering iron and then bashed them onto the pins. Result: a finished Workmate ready to do battle with the shelving, but sadly no more time to make shelves. I guess I will get to it later in the year.