Lessons learned

The used SUV we bought for our sons came with a lugnut-style lock on the rear-mounted spare tire. But no key.

A special type of star-shaped key was needed to unscrew the lock. We couldn't find a matching one anywhere. I tried auto parts stores, hardware stores, tire shops. Nobody could help. The advice I universally got was to hammer a socket onto the chrome lugnut lock, then ratchet them both off. I tried this several times, buying expensive jumbo sockets each time, and could never get it to work. I showed the lock to friends with power tools. I hit it with a hammer. I tried anything to avoid an expensive trip to the locksmith.

This went on for months and months. Always, somewhere in the back of my mind, was my losing battle with this lock. If I forgot about it, the car promptly got a flat, which required a full emergency rescue and served as a reminder that the spare was useless as long as that lock was in the way.

Finally, I broke down. Yesterday, teeth clenched against the expected expense, we took the car to a locksmith. The locksmith used an expansion socket, which is tapered inside, and had the lock off of there in minutes. The cost? Eight bucks.

I'd spent three times that much on sockets that I subsequently ruined with a hammer. Not to mention the hundreds of dollars spent on antacids and headache remedies and booze. All trying to avoid that expensive trip to the locksmith. Duh.

Two lessons here that we've all heard before, but bear repeating:

1) Use the right tool for the job.

2) Leave it to the experts.

It's much easier to write a check than to jury-rig a solution that probably won't work and may result in personal injury. Often, the experts don't cost as much as we fear. Besides, you can make up the cost with savings on booze.

What a tool

I recently repaired a dripping drainpipe under a bathroom sink. This is remarkable for several reasons:

1) I usually can’t fix anything.
2) Plumbing problems typically make me weep while reaching for the phone and the checkbook.
3) I actually sought, heeded and understood advice from the expert at the hardware store.
4) I didn’t make the problem worse, trying to fix it.
5) The job required no new tools. Or duct tape.

The leak was caused by a simple cracked washer. I replaced the beveled washer, put the drain back together and -- surprise! -- the leak stopped. Since the drain consists of plastic pipes, screwed together by hand, no tools were necessary.

It’s this last item that made the job most unusual. Household repairs generally require knowledge and/or use of tools. For those of us who are unhandy and/or idiots, this often is the sticking point.

Way down in the fine print of Murphy’s Laws, you’ll find this: No matter what household repair you attempt, it will require a specialized tool that you do not own.

We unhandy idiots react to this in different ways. We give up immediately and call a professional who owns the applicable tools and knows how to use them. Or, we try to force the issue, using the wrong tool, which often results in a much higher eventual repair bill. Or, we make yet another trip to the hardware store for the correct tool.

Having the right tool for the job doesn’t necessarily mean the repair will be a snap, of course. It’s still possible to make things much, much worse, particularly if running water is involved. Trust me. But with the proper tool, the home handyman has a fighting chance of success.

He also has a new tool. One that (and I’m pretty sure Murphy covers this somewhere, too) he will never, ever need again.

In this way, long-time homeowners accumulate a vast collection of esoteric tools. Not to mention fasteners and washers and assorted stray parts.

We keep them forever. Because you never know. We might one day need that socket/mallet/jigsaw/crowbar/drill bit/screw extender/stud finder/butt hinge/torque wrench/detonator. And wouldn’t we hate to make yet another trip to the hardware store?

Unless you’re one of those neat freaks who keeps all his tools “organized,” possessing these specialized tools means that every home repair becomes a museum tour through the garage. You go to fetch a simple hammer and find yourself, an hour later, pondering a reverse butterfly ratcheting nut-driver. You probably can’t remember how you use that gizmo. Probably can’t recall why you bought it in the first place. But there it is, among the tools, taking up space, in the way.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to tools, of course. Home offices also accumulate assorted widgets and electronics that seemed absolutely necessary at one time, but now are good only for paperweights.

Go take a look in your kitchen. If it’s like ours, it’s full of specialized choppers, strainers, scrapers, graters and gravy boats that rarely get dusted off. Not to mention foods and spices purchased for particular recipes, then rarely used again. How else to explain shelves overflowing with little jars of fennel seed, cumin and turmeric?

And let’s not even mention the medicine cabinet, crammed full of outdated pills, outmoded cosmetics and dried-out tubes of mystery ointment.

It’s enough to make me hit myself in the head in despair. If I could only find the hammer.

Conquering a mountain of stuff

Somewhere in your home -- spare bedroom, attic, basement, garage -- lives the Repository of Stuff We Don’t Use Anymore.

It’s a mystical place of letter sweaters and souvenir ashtrays, baby clothes and broken crockery, Magic Eight Balls and eight-track tapes, outgrown toys and outmoded phones and old jeans that’ll fit again after we drop 20 pounds (yeah, right).

Once in a blue moon, someone in your household will feel compelled to clean out this accumulated detritus. We could make better use of that space, the thinking goes, and we’ll never, ever need this stuff again. Why not get rid of it?

This is an admirable ambition, but, as with so many things, it’s easier said than done. Parting with your old stuff is a hard, dirty job that requires elbow grease and grit and resolve. Not to mention backache medication and frequent hot showers and, quite possibly, an expensive divorce.

At our house, the Repository of Unused Stuff was in our three-car garage. I don’t want to say how much dusty stuff we had piled up, but there was barely room for two vehicles. You do the math.

This heap of random stuff didn’t bother me. Sure, we’d moved it all a couple of times. Sure, some of the boxes weren’t even labeled. But I figured, as long as I could get my minivan door open and squeeze inside, everything was fine. The stuff wasn’t hurting anything. We’d sort it out eventually. Maybe a small fire would solve the problem for us …

My wife had other ideas. The stacks of sacks and boxes and assorted belongings bugged her. She’d put up with this stuff for years, and it was high time we did something about it.
Of course, she’s got no time herself. She’s busy having a career. So it fell to me to tackle the garage. She urged me to leap into action, in a sort of X-Treme Spring-Cleaning Challenge, and conquer Mt. Stuff with speed and muscle and brainpower.

I’m not a leap-into-action sort of guy. I’m more of a sit-and-ponder-and-sigh type. When I do finally take action, it’s almost imperceptible.

I oozed out into the garage and started opening boxes and sorting through sacks. I hauled off stuff. I threw some away. I gave a lot to charity. Gradually, the mound of stuff grew smaller.

The goal was to make that third garage useable. Our older son has a car now, and if we could lose enough stuff, he could park indoors. Not that he’s ever home. Not that we care if his filthy car sits out in the weather. But you’ve got to set goals to take on a job like this.

After I got rid of a lot of stuff, I ran into a true dilemma. What remained -- extra furniture, an old microwave, a portable TV -- would be perfect for a dorm room or a first apartment. If I kept it, with an eye toward my son moving out soon, then he couldn’t park in the garage. If I got rid of it, he’d have another excuse to never leave home.

So I took all that stuff and put it in his car.

Kidding! It wouldn’t fit in his car. And he wouldn’t take the hint anyway.

No, I’m still stacking and sorting and throwing stuff out. Slowly making progress. Someday, I’ll be finished. That old stuff will be out of our lives, once and for all.

Then it’ll be time to get some new stuff.

(Editor's note: After this column appeared, I found a way to stack all the future apartment furniture around the walls so our son could park in the garage. It's still there. He still hasn't moved out. Maybe I could just furnish the garage and he could live out there. . .)

Brain sweat

Like many of my fellow bloated Americans, I exercise daily in an attempt to shed pounds and to keep my stressed heart from one day popping like a balloon.

Many people pay for memberships to gyms, where they at least have the distraction of other members, including some in leotards. But those of us who work out at home are constantly reminded that exercise is boring.

Our minds wander all over, getting as big a workout as our bodies. I've got my treadmill set up in the garage with all kinds of distractions handy -- a small TV, reading material, music. But my brain bounces from topic to topic like a pinball, always coming back to the fact that I could keel over from exertion any minute, resulting in the big "Game Over."

Random thoughts from a typical workout on the Dreadmill:

Remember when exercise was all about having fun? When did it become drudgery? Here I am, bored out of my skull, walking to nowhere. Let's not think about how that's a metaphor for Life.

God, my legs are going to fall off. If they did, could I get new ones grafted on? Ones that already had muscles? Then I could skip the workouts and still look better in shorts.

These days, doctors can transplant most anything, including faces, from one human to another. Too bad they haven't mastered personality transplants. I can think of some people who'd benefit from that.

What is that huffing sound? Oh, it's me.

If Americans keep living longer and longer, will huffing and puffing eventually become the background music of life?

You know you're older when "getting lucky" refers to the last piece of cake.

How come we have angel's food cake and devil's food cake and who decided which is which? Do they serve those in heaven and hell? If so, I'll go with the chocolate, even if it means eternal fire.

Mmm, cake.

What the heck is manna? You always hear about "manna from heaven." Does it come in chocolate?

How come Death's always pictured as a specter in a hooded cloak, carrying a scythe? At new year's time, the long-bearded Old Year carries a scythe, too. Is he related to Death? How do you use a scythe anyway?

What's that awful smell? Oh, that's me, too.

The bravest person who ever lived was the one who first ate a lobster. Here's this creature, looks like a big bug, comes armed with clacking claws. Drop it into boiling water and it turns bright red -- a sure warning sign. And yet, somebody was the first to say, hey, let's eat this thing.

Mmm, lobster.

Is that the phone? Probably another telemarketer. Here's the perfect thing to say to get rid of telemarketers: "So. What are you wearing?"

Is that a chest pain? Nah. But what if it was? I'm all alone here. Could I get to a phone and call for help before it's too late? Would my family find me here, hours later, facedown on the treadmill? Would I have big black rubber burns on my face? I'd better start keeping my cell phone nearby.

I could use my workout time to talk on the phone, if people didn't mind the puffing. They'd probably hang up, thinking it was an obscene call. "It's that breather again…."

Mmm, breathing.

Time's almost up. Just a few more minutes of agony, then I can get off this machine and get on with my day. Assuming I don't pass out first.

Wonder how much liposuction costs?

Getting the dog fixed

We put our dog in the shop and took our van to the veterinarian--

Wait, that's backward. The two events happened the same week and will be forever linked in my mind, but of course it was the other way around. Dog to vet. Van to shop.

Two major "repairs" in one week are enough to throw most households into a tizzy. We're all so busy, we can't afford for one thing to go wrong in our tight schedules.

At our house, the madness progressed this way:

The van developed a dribble, leaving freckles all over the driveway. I'd convinced myself the brakes were acting funny, so it was time for a professional diagnosis.

Our dog, meanwhile, wasn't dribbling any more than usual, but he'd developed a growth on his hip. (That last sentence doesn't read right. Looks like our dog is named Meanwhile, which is not the case. Meanwhile would be a good name for a dog, but ours is named Elvis.)

The growth, a cyst with a very long, medical-sounding name, had been checked by the vet before, but it kept getting bigger. We began to think Elvis was growing a second head so he could see where he'd been. I took him back to the vet, who, when he saw the new, improved cyst, said, "Whoa! That's gotta come off!"

So the van was in the shop. The dog was at the vet's. And I sat by the phone, cringing over how much it all would cost.

The repair shop called. Nothing wrong with the brakes, but the rack-and-pinion unit (which sounds like a medieval torture device, but actually has something to do with the steering) must be replaced. Yipes.

At the vet's office, Elvis went under the knife. After many anxious hours, I got word that the procedure had gone fine, the extra head had been removed and the dog could come home in a couple of days. Whew.

Back at the repair shop, they got the "unit" and put it on my van. Alas, it was the wrong "unit" and wouldn't fit properly. Another "unit" was ordered.

The next day, the shop called again. The correct unit was attached to my van, where it promptly broke. They'd get a new unit right away, though, and I should have my van back in no time.

Elvis came home -- my wife picked him up because, guess what, I still didn't have my van -- and we were shocked at his appearance. His entire left rear quarter-panel had been shaved and he had an eight-inch incision where the cyst used to be. He wore a large plastic lampshade around his head so he couldn't gnaw his numerous stitches.

"Frankendog," as we called him, stumbled around the house, crashing into furniture and raking the flesh off our shinbones with the sharp edges of his lampshade. But he healed up nicely.

The van, meanwhile, finally got its repairs finished and came home. (Hey, maybe I'll name my van "Meanwhile.") It steers just fine and no longer leaves spots on the driveway, though the brakes still feel funny.

Guess which one cost the most. If you guessed the van, you win a big prize, which is a plastic lampshade we don't need anymore.

So all is right at our house until something else breaks or sprouts a cyst. My money's on the van. When the brakes finally go, I'm taking it to the vet.

Garage sale shuffle

'Tis the season of garage sales, as millions of Americans try to unload their accumulated stuff on the unsuspecting public.

It's the Great Black Market of summer, the annual redistribution of wealth. People out in their yards in lawn chairs, marking down their worldly possessions.

We've all got too much stuff, piling up everywhere and thwarting every attempt to park in our own garages. So we sell off some of it, thin the herd, streamline things around the house.
And, before you know it, the house is jam-packed again, and it's time for another garage sale.

Why does this keep happening? Because we're buying stuff from our neighbors' garage sales, stuff they in turn got from garage sales years ago. The stuff goes round and round, and you end up buying a Salad Shooter that's just like the one you used to have . . .

There's a whole food chain of kitchen gizmos and baby furniture and bowling trophies circulating untaxed through the economy. Some items -- and I'm thinking here of ceramic panthers -- have moved from house to house for generations.

Next time you have a garage sale, do a quick inventory. Half the stuff you're selling probably came from flea markets and other people's garage sales. Stuff you never should've bought in the first place. Stuff people were GETTING RID OF.

(Thirty percent of the stuff you're selling will be things you bought "on sale," even though you didn't need them. The rest will be wedding gifts that you'll never unload.)

Getting rid of it all becomes more complicated once you have children. Kids never want to get rid of anything, ever. Broken toys, commemorative T-shirts, filthy sneakers, rocks, bones, lumps of dirt -- all these things have great sentimental value to children.

This detritus accumulates around the house, filling our lives with sentimentality and whimsy and punctured bare feet. We parents can never throw any of it away because of Murphy's Law of Parenting: The item you throw out will be the one the child really, really needs to finish the big school project on deadline.

This law applies to all homework papers. No matter how much the parent may try to parse out a date or a grade or some other signal that each stray rumpled page is no longer current, he or she will make the occasional mistake and throw out the child's important homework. Or, worse, some other child's important homework. And the parent will never hear the end of it. So school papers amass around the house like bales of cotton on a riverboat dock.

Same goes for any plastic "action figure" or balsa-wood airplane. Throw it out, and it's the one the child was using to prove Important Facts About Gravity in the science fair.

Any teddy bear or toy the parent tries to discard will immediately become the child's favorite one. How could you possibly get rid of that broken Shrek we got for free at some burger joint? The child LOVES that toy and is now emotionally bereft and will require expensive therapy.

When spring cleaning comes around, parents are forced to engage in stealth operations to get rid of their children's stuff. We ship bales of old homework off to the dump when the kids aren't looking. We creep around in the middle of the night, stuffing toys into black trash bags, hiding the evidence. On the day of the garage sale, we ship the kids off to Grandma's to keep them from scaring off customers with crying fits in the driveway.

We roll out the bazaar of baby clothes and broken burger toys and ceramic panthers and important homework, and a few customers trickle by and haul off some of the stuff. American commerce carries on.

Unfortunately, most of the inventory doesn't move. All the unsold stuff must return to the "warehouse," otherwise known as the space in the garage where the car should live.

So what if we must park on the street? At least we've thinned the inventory. We've cleaned out closets and raked toys out from under beds. Our lives are organized and ready for summer.

Just in time for the flea markets.

King of the castle

We've all heard that old saw, "A man's home is his castle," meant to convey independence and safety and the sanctity of private property.

The adage no doubt dates from the days when a man's home really was a castle, and anyone who dared interfere risked a moat and vats of boiling oil. Men were kings of their domains, as long as they "kept the home fires burning" under the oil vats.

Over the years, some men have taken the castle allegory further, using it to convince themselves they're the rulers of the household.

(Back in the "Ozzie and Harriett" days when I was a kid, my brother and I sometimes would try to put unpopular parental decisions to a vote. This was met with derision from my father, who would always say, "This isn't a democracy. It's a monarchy. And I'm the king." We children would shuffle away, muttering and plotting an overthrow that never came.)

These days, equality is the coin of the realm, and men who try to pretend they're kings are fooling themselves. Those emperors have no clothes, no matter how much they may rail about "wearing the pants in this family." Wives smile to themselves, knowing who's really in charge, and the kids can't even hear the king's commands because they're wearing headphones full of thumping rap music.

It's time to modify the old saying. Here's my suggestion: "A man's GARAGE is his castle."
In the house, Dad may be an impotent potentate, his blustery decrees overriden by calm females, his kids screaming for his head like an angry mob. But when Dad goes to the garage, he's still the king.

Drive around any suburban neighborhood on any Sunday afternoon and peer in the garage doors that are standing open. You'll find men in there. Building stuff. Tinkering with cars. Or just lounging in lawn chairs, sipping Buds and watching sports on portable TVs, sometimes in the company of other monarchs from neighboring realms.

Why the garage?

--All our stuff is there. Family men can't just leave oily rags and random tools lying around the kitchen. Not if we ever want to see them again. That stuff belongs in the garage, preferably on pegboards. Wrenches and hammers and mowers and drills and old saws, all carefully organized. We men can spend hour upon hour just arranging our tools. It's a harmless activity, akin to collecting baseball cards, and it keeps us occupied. And, when we need a particular tool, there's always the long-shot chance that we can actually find it.

--Men need time alone with their thoughts. These aren't necessarily deep thoughts, often no deeper than "where did I put that wrench," but the garage is the only quiet place where we can ponder them. We all need "down time" so we can sit among our sharpened lawn tools and fantasize about the demise of our bosses and other enemies.

--Garages are, by their very nature, dirty. Men may be afraid to set a beer on the coffee table without a coaster, but in the garage we can spill oil and paint and grease. Nobody cares. We're in our little fiefdoms, and we can make them as filthy as we like.

--The garage is the only place where we men might actually fix something. Most men, when attenpting a tricky car repair or reassembling toilet innards, need solitude so we can concentrate. Also, alone in the garage, we can curse with impunity when we're injured or the repair job goes wrong.

--We get a break from that raucous "quality time" with our families. Our wives and children know to leave us alone when we're in the garage. They know, if they interrupt whatever manly endeavors we're attempting out there, they're likely to be put to work. Plus, they don't want to hear all that cursing.

So, men of America, go to the garage. Consider it your hideout, your clubhouse. Heck, call it your castle, if you so desire. Fashion yourself a crown and wear it while you tinker. Be the King of Greater Pegboardia.

You'll get comfort and peace. You'll finally get some solitude. You can even spit on the floor if you want.

But don't try boiling oil. It spatters, and those burns will only set you to cursing.