Life: Power Tools Required

Some things are better left to the imagination. This is not one of those things….

Connor (12) has a project due tomorrow. He needs to create a musical instrument.

Yes, I said “create”. As in from scratch. Don’t these people understand what a slippery slope this is?

Backing up a bit, may I present the earlier scene, accurately entitled “She can’t even boil an egg, I tell ya.”

It’s lunchtime and I’ve got a hankering for an egg salad sandwich. (What can I say? I have very basic, simple needs.) After boiling said eggs in water, I place them (covered) off to the side to sit for 20 minutes. When the timer goes off, I call Connor to aid me with the removal of the eggshells. (Author’s note: I’d seen my dad throw some baking soda into the water prior to removing the shells…he said it helped. It did not help me.)

By the time we’d finished removing the shells, we had very little of the actual eggs still in tact. It was a very sad, depressing little yellow and white mound ‘o egg, if I do say so. Connor just kept saying “What’s wrong with this one? Is there something wrong with them? This cannot possibly be right.” It took until I’d added a little too much mayo to realize that there would be no happy ending to this fairy tale…I chalked it up to saving myself from a trip to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.

Fast-forward a few hours and Connor’s musical instrument debacle. I’d casually suggested that we could drill a couple of holes into a PVC pipe and call it a Plute-a-Fone. Connor seemed to like this idea. This would involve stealing one leg off of Jeffrey-the-Kickball-Headed-Ghost’s body…and since we’d already absconded with his head, I felt we were golden. Locating Jeffrey was harder than I’d suspected...and when I finally located one of his legs, I discovered that the PVC pipe we’d used was curved…and not straight. Add to this the fact that upon blowing into one end of said pipe, no sound whatsoever emerged from the other end of said pipe.

Huh.

This may be more of a challenge than I’d originally anticipated. After relating this crucial information to Connor, we began the laborious process of putting our creative heads together to fashion the perfect musical instrument….off the cuff, as it were. After much deliberation, we focused our efforts on finding an old doggie-toy of Metro’s, which we knew contained a sound-maker that when placed upside down made a sound like on the cartoons when someone falls down (kind of a “WAH, Wah, wah……w-a-aaaaaah…….). After 6, 3, many trips to the garage, the toy was located.

Our next challenge was how to break into said toy to retrieve its (WAH, Wah, wah……w-a-aaaaaah…….) inner workings, as it was encased in a singular, molded, hard plastic case…shaped like a doggie bone in festive Christmas colors of green and red. Our first effort involved a saw, a slipped finger and some blood. (Yes, the blood was mine…thank you for your concern.)

Next, I brought up the cordless drill. The batteries were dead. After that, I brought up the power drill. We then proceeded to drill little, teeny connecting holes all the way around the molded-plastic-Christmas-doggie-bone….with me holding the bone and the drill…and Connor... holding his hands near my eyes in an effort to shield my eyes from flying plastic-debris. (I thought that was very considerate of him…don’t you?)

All Connor kept saying was “Boy, I’m glad Grandpa isn’t here to see this…he’d be furious!”

In the end, we got the job done. The fact that it took us twice as long to clean up as it did to complete the project is testament to our flying by the seat of our pants.

Connor has yet to name our un-named musical creation. I’d offered the singular suggestion of “Wah-wee!” as my creativity is just about depleted for the day, thankyouverymuch.

And, see Dad? Still ten fingers…ten toes. Two eyes.

Still golden.