Acceleration Due to Gravity-1, HomeOwnerMan-0

It was a quite Saturday around Gothhome City, the kind where there was no need for millionaire Steve Dzwonczyk to go into his closet full of lycra spandex suits emblazoned with the giant “H” above the crossed hammer and screwdriver crest. He was doing what other millionaires do on a Saturday, trying to stick it to the man. You see, Florence, who some have alleged is the mortal alter-ego of Wife Girl, was remarking that she wished she had better reception on their 27” cathode-ray-tube-style TV, which was the “big TV” in the house incidentally. They had said goodbye a year earlier to the 400 channels of infomercials offered by DirecTV; they had long ago said goodbye to the 300 channels of poor reception and commercials provided by RCN. They were antenna people now, and were $69 dollars a month richer and had access to some of the finest non-English and faith-based programming offered digitally over the airwaves. And while they were ideally located halfway between the Philadelphia and New York TV broadcast markets, their reception wasn’t as good as they had hoped. But this was all about to change.

Having recently conversed with Neighbor Guy, Steve was convinced that the problem with the reception was due to a wiring problem. While the signal coming into the house was very good, it dropped precipitously by the time it reached the TVs. After extensive testing, it became apparent that the many splices in the coaxial cable were reducing the signal. It seemed such a trivial thing to replace that Steve didn’t even call in the services of HomeOwnerMan, but instead decided to tackle the project himself.

Armed with 100 feet of fresh coax and a brand new crimping tool, Steve made his way up the treacherous ladder to the attic. It had snowed in the attic two summers earlier, leaving 18 inches of fresh white fluffy insulation, which made negotiating the attic, which had no floor, a bit tricky to negotiate. But Steve had beaten a path through the fluff to the far end of the attic where the antenna is located. But like a bolt of lightning, gravity decided to apply its grip to Steve. If he had donned his HomeOwnerMan uniform, it would have been trivial and have gone unnoticed. But Steve lost his balance and began falling at 32 feet per-second-per-second, breaking through the ceiling of Son Boy’s room. Fortunately, Steve was stopped by a heroic ceiling joist which he straddled at high speed. The blunt force of the fall was enough to cause the middle region of him to turn entirely black and blue, rendering him incapable of sitting or wearing normal-sized pants for some time. A third keester, whose presence was here-to-fore unknown, appeared making it impossible to sit down. Private parts turned colors they ought not turn. Ice packs became a close friend for several days, followed by hot compresses and soaks in the hot tub. Tying shoes became a new dimension in fun.

In pain and unable to sit, Steve flashed the hammer-shaped beacon skyward, summoning HomeOwnerMan. Like a flash HomeOwnerMan swooped in and assessed the situation. Seeing the gaping hole in Son Boy’s room, HomeOwnerMan went into the materials cave to look for a sufficient piece of drywall. But the available pieces were too small. So HomeOwnerMan and Wife Girl hopped into the HomeOwner Mobile and sped off to Lowes to buy drywall, schmutz (that’s what super-heros call spackle), and drywall screws. But the weather gods were frowning on HomeOwnerMan and Wife Girl, and the heavens began to rain and winds began to blow as they placed the, notice the word “dry”, drywall into the bed of the Homeowner mobile. The angry-faced woman at Lowes supplied HomeOwnerMan and Wife Girl with plastic and nylon twine, but nothing else. Together they feebly attempted to fashion weather-proofing for the drywall, and Wife Girl went back in to buy a roll of masking tape. The masking tape, however, came off in small masking shreds which were unsuitable for anything but rolling into pea-sized spitballs. Frustrated, they made their way back to Gothhome with the drywa…sheetrock.

There, they cut a 32” x 62” rectangle of board, which nearly matched the size to the hole in the ceiling once it had been enlarged to a more regular polyhedron. Enlarging the hole made for great fun as the white insulation, as well as pink fiberglass insulation from an earlier era, came raining down on them into Son Boy’s room.

The super-family teamed up to fit the board in place in the ceiling. Using “the gizmo” (an 8 foot 2 x 4 with a small flat piece of plywood at the top) to hold the sheetrock in place, HomeOwnerMan screwed it in place. Using perforated tape and schmutz, HomeOwnerMan painstakingly matched the surfaces until the ceiling and the patch became one. Primer and paint are next.

HomeOwnerMan – making the ordinary extra ordinary.