I Cut a Whole in a Wall Today

I’m just now realizing that all of these stories, if told by someone else, would probably be one sentence long. I’m not sure if my need to interject pages worth of drama into everything I do is good or bad. Dear reader, you decide. And let me know.

For example, the above story about the fence, written by a normal person, would probably read like this, “I was trying to bolt together some posts and realized I didn’t have the right sized bolts, started talking to myself and acting like a freak when I realized my new neighbor was hunting just behind me. The end.” As per the story at hand, I really did just cut a whole in a wall today, but I’ve never done that before, so for me this is the height of drama!

Part of me doesn’t want to tell you why I cut a hole in the wall. I want to keep you in suspense, but probably you’ll just stop reading if I don’t start getting to the point a little faster, so here goes: I am making a walk-in cooler. The hole is for the AC unit. There’s this little room in my garage that was already insulated (unlike the rest of the garage), for god knows what reason, and it’s just the right size for my cooler. So, all I have to do is insulate it a little more and put in an AC unit. Here’s where things start to get fancy. There’s this crazy genius type who lives on the other side of the mountains as me and has a position in the United Nations and he’s always inventing things. One thing he invented is a gizmo that you hook to a regular home air conditioning unit that you buy at your local hardware store and it turns it into a high-powered compressor for a walk-in cooler—which usually costs thousands of dollars (http://www.storeitcold.com/). As it happens, not only did this place come with an odd little room in the corner of the garage that was already insulated, it also came with a spare home air conditioning unit. So, after carefully figuring out where the electrical wires were, I began sawing a hole in the wall. Even though I knew I was nowhere near the wires, I decided that maybe there were wires in between the plywood and vinyl siding on the outside of the garage, which makes no sense, but as I’m holding this reciprocating saw that is vibrating the entire garage, shaking the fluorescent light ballast just above my head, causing the bulbs to flicker, I decided that somehow I was gonna’ hit a wire. So, in the interest of safety, I turned off the electricity and cut a hole in the wall--with a sharp power tool I didn’t really know how to use—in the dark. Nice.

Again, another person would have said, “I sawed a hole in the wall for an AC unit that I’m turning into a walk-in cooler compressor by using UN guy’s AC gizmo.” But, I like how I manage to get a tinge of life threatening danger into my day-to-day.