No Lowe's please

Cool! There are those of you out there who only wear or mostly wear your favorite jewelry sets. To hear it from female relatives who shall remain nameless, I am the only one on the planet who indulges in such weirdness. HA! I'm NOT alone - some of y'all are as weird as I am! Same-jewelry-wearing sisters unite!

DH worked like a fiend on redoing the six windows on our addition this weekend. He got four of them done. He probably could have finished all six if we could have stayed out of Lowe's.

Back last summer, after rebuilding an inside wall on our house while using a hammer, DH expressed the desire to buy a pneumatic nail gun. He didn't want to spend a lot because he didn't think he'd use it a lot (I knew better). It's inconvenient for us to rent small tools due to the one hour drive time to town and back. So he found a generic one on eBay and bought it. With shipping, it was $135.00.

It worked fine on several projects. This weekend, it died. I figure it lasted through about 36 hours of use, so it cost us about $3.75 per hour to use. A good deal. However, it died when DH needed it, so I talked him into getting another one of better quality because he was using it a lot more than he thought he would (I knew he would).

FYI, you just about have to use a nail gun when nailing Hardi-plank. The darn stuff is so hard that you can't pound a nail through it without drilling pilot holes; the stuff is made of concrete!

So we went to Lowe's and DH studied all of the nail guns for a long time and then bought the one that had the features he wanted most. He brought it home and right out of the box, the darn thing wouldn't work.

Back to Lowe's we go. DH stood in front of the nail gun display and studied some more. He carefully read labels. While he was doing this, a small and deeply tanned man walked up and stood beside him. He pretended to study the nail guns. After about 10 seconds of pretending, he asked, "Hey buddy, you buying a nail gun?" DH said yes. Then the guy stood there for about 20 minutes and told DH everything he could possibly want to know about nail guns, including what brands worked the best and lasted the longest. Turned out he's a framing contractor. (He was in Lowe's because his wife was looking at wallpaper and he wandered over to the tools to look at something more manly.) So DH bought a nail gun that worked right out of the box, had lots of power, and was he was a happy man.

A note from my stitching chair: I managed to stitch quite a bit this weekend on the "The Alamo." I'm not far enough along for you to tell anything, so I'll not post a picture. Here's a picture of the pattern, however. This pattern was designed in 1985 and is hand-charted. It was printed on a huge sheet of paper that would not fit on my copier without a lot of folding. So I just made a working copy without enlarging it. The hand-drawn symbols may cause me to go blind!