A man should be able to tell when he just has a dead battery, and not have his car towed to the dealership to get bent over for $200 for a $60 battery.

A man should know when to change the air filter on his heater, and should be able to tell whether an electric stove doesn’t work because a circuit breaker is bad, or because it’s just not connected properly.

A man should be able to make his front door stop sticking (without giving his grandpa the impression that he’s not “a woodworking guy” because this is too elementary to get all blogcited about).

A man should be able to install a ceiling fan without actually crawling into the attic, and if he does go into the attic, a man should know better than to rest his big fat butt on the drywall (Holey ceiling, Batman!).

A man should be able to backup his own data so he doesn’t have to pay One Large to The Man to restore it when the hard drive fails.

And most recently, a man should be able to not just peek under his dishwasher and decide that it’s not leaking, but also think enough to try peeking under the dishwasher when it’s running, so he can see the water for himself, rather than worrying himself (and his wife) with fears of a subterranean pipe leak, which could only be fixed by ripping out cabinets and jackhammering concrete. A man shouldn’t have to call a plumber who calls (and marks up) a leak-finder who peeks under the dishwasher, turns it on, and says ‘voila’.

And so now (partly out of penance, partly out of cheapness, mostly out of pride), a man should definitely be able to install a new dishwasher by himself. Hopefully it will be easier than disconnecting the old one…

What a busy weekend; mowed the (in places) knee-high "grass", weed-whacked, trimmed back ground-cover plants that were spilling over large areas to become concrete-cover, changed the oil in Homer (the Honda Odyssey), changed the wiper blades on Elmo (the red VW), plus the usual church stuff.

In Sunday School, I burst the bubble of half a dozen 8/9 year olds. Discussing the healing of the crippled beggar in Acts 3, and a worksheet multiple-choice option that he was healed "because he believed in himself enough", I explained how they will be told sometime in their life "If you believe in yourself, you can do anything!", and how that is hogwash. Fortunately, this is not the end of the story; the point of understanding man's fallen condition is not to beat our children (or selves) into submissive low self-esteem, but to teach a proper understanding of ourselves as made in God's image, loved by God, redeemed and restored by God. Indeed, the memory verse assigned to this lesson in the class materials is an excellent foil to the above worldly fallacy:

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Actually, I didn't burst any bubbles. They took it really well.

And there was an interesting point made in the sermon about one of my hobby horses, the pusillanimity of Contemporary Christian Music. Citing a New York Times article, which compared CCM with other modern and "emo" (what is that? "emo"tional? lame and whiny like ColdPlay?) music from a secular perspective. Some choice quotes:

Consider the modern-rock and emo bands who dominate contemporary rock radio; they're full of earnest and rather clean-cut young men who often seem more interested in the power of love than the power of lust. So what difference would it make if those plaintive lyrics were about a Him instead of a her?

…MercyMe relies upon a familiar (though often effective) head-fake: the song seems to be about a romantic relationship, but it turns out to be a relationship with God…One of the strangest things about this album is how rarely it mentions Jesus by name [as compared to] the country-pop smash "Jesus Take the Wheel," by the "American Idol" winner Carrie Underwood.

The point: if you can sing your "worship" songs to your significant other without heresy, there's probably something wrong. "God is not your girlfriend."

It’s been probably a month now, but since I have some pictures of the finished tile handy, I thought I’d post them.

Here’s from the hallway across the dining room and under the bar, with #2 at the table, reading US News & World Report.

Here’s from the living room, towards the dining room & back door (look, there’s #1 just off-frame to the left!)

It’s worked out pretty well, and so far the tile has withstood the two ultimate tests: an entire broken bottle of maple syrup, and globs of mustard-yellow baby poop (right in the grout)!

Whatever happened to the late-90’s expression that swept the nation: “I’m having a bad hair day”?  It seems to have dropped out of our national lexicon (reader challenge: what other recent faddish expressions have fallen by the wayside?).  Anyways, we had a bad house day.  The tile is still not finished (grout needs sealing), so we have not yet put back our dining table and reassembled our kitchen, so we can resume our regular lives.  The heater is acting up (even after replacing the filter (probably because I took so long to replace the filter), the re-installed stove is not working, we’ve got water leaking into the side of our house near the edge of the new tile, and we are again getting sporadic inability to dial-up to the internet, due to some kind of electrical interference; it seems like everything goes wrong at once!

By the end of the day, I did manage to fix the stove (by paying $40 to replace an obsolete circuit breaker (which didn’t help), and eventually finding one of the three strands of the power cord had come loose).  The Gas Man (contrary to popular opinion, it’s not me) will be coming to look at the heater for free on Wed (i.e. he’ll estimate for us how many hundreds of $$ we’ll have to pay to have it serviced).

House owning/operating can be draining at times! 

So I’m working up a giant post on Infant Baptism (which I’m sure will settle the question once and for all).  Hopefully it will be ready for release soon, because it’s going to be a very busy week, with tile being installed in our house (from the front door to the hallway, including the kitchen, dining, bathroom, and under the bar: about 300sq ft), and me going on travel (two days of flying for one day of meetings, plus I will get to meet The Forester’s baby!  If I don’t get it done on time, it will have to wait for next week, I’m sure.  Maybe I’ll publish my draft in whatever state it’s in before I travel, so I can come back home to plenty of flames!

Last night I fixed the sticking front door that has been gradually getting worse ever since we bought our house. It was so easy, I thought I’d share because others probably have the same problem.  The problem was that the top hinge wasn’t holding well, and I couldn’t tighten the screws, because they were stripped. A while ago, I used a chisel to expand the hinge mortise up an inch, and drill screws into fresh holes, but that didn’t last. The solution, as detailed with pictures here (Scroll down to “In some cases the longer screws will not hit solid wood”), is to drill out the screw holes, plug them up with wood glue and wooden dowels (you don’t even have to worry about sawing them off neatly; you can just break it off!), drill little pilot holes, and your screws will hold just fine. For good measure I also used a chisel to deepen the mortise a little bit. Now the door closes great! And since I didn’t have to buy any tools for this job, the cost was $0.59 for a 1/4″ dowel; and I still have most of it left!