Event Review - Fixing the Fence

I was going to write a review of To Kill A Mockingbird tonight. I took my kids to see a remastered version of the 1967 classic last week. Then the next morning my dogs got out, ran a mile in the middle of the city, and killed some lady's cat on her front lawn. Now they're in quarantine and we're waiting to find out if they're going to be euthanized (which is a pretty way to say that some city employee with an eighth-grade education is going to stick a needle in them and pump them full of poison). So the movie review got canceled, because my mood is way too dark to discuss classic film.

The dogs got out because one of them is a little jailbreaking pain in the ass. She has knocked out so many boards that it got past the point that I could patch the holes. I needed to flat-out replace them, and just hadn't got around to it. My wife let them out the back door before the sun was up and then went back inside, and now they're in the hoosegow waiting to find out if they're going to hang.

This weekend I fixed the fence. Yeah, that does sound a little like closing the barn door after the horses are gone, but we're pretty sure the investigator for the city is going to stop by the house, and we want the house to look like we don't want our dogs to run away. If you've never sunk fence posts, allow me to recommend using something heavy, like a ditch witch or something. Digging a three-foot-deep hole with a shovel hurt my back so bad I was almost in traction. But the cement set up just fine, and that post isn't going anywhere for a long time. I am glad I only had to sink one post, though. After having to buy all that wood, I don't have enough money left over to go get a massage.

Another task that sucks is tearing out old wooden fence. There were places on the fence where I'm pretty sure a spark would have lit the whole thing, and it would have gone up in one loud 'foosh!' like in a cartoon, leaving nails hanging in the air for a couple seconds before they tumbled to the ground. We discovered lots of varieties of wood-dwelling insects in our repairs. I got to bond with my son when he wouldn't handle a board because he kept finding ants on it. Can't blame him - fire ant bites are one of the many reasons it sucks to live in North Texas. Still, that meant I had to do it. You would think a boy old enough to have hair on his face would want to prove his stones, but I guess we'll keep waiting on that.

Aside from lots of splinters and a gigantic bruise on my leg from a flying two-by-four, fixing the fence was uneventful. It was the gloomiest repair I ever did, though, because half the time I'm cursing the idiot dog who caused this much grief, and the other half the time I'm hoping against hope to get her back. My house is in a state of pre-mourning, waiting a week to find out if we're going to be celebrating their return or cremating them and putting their urns with the other dogs we've lost in the last sixteen years.

I know that, as reviews go, this was entirely worthless. Seriously, who needs a review of fixing a fence? It's a crappy job, and it hurts, and it's especially bad if you're only doing it as a semi-futile gesture to try to get the investigator guy to see how much you want your dogs back. But it's also kind of my weak-ass excuse to explain why you're not reading something worthwhile here. And I suppose at some level, it's just me bitching, and maybe me thinking there's any reason for anyone to care. Which there isn't, unless you really like my dogs.