I have always longed to be handy around the house. Oh! To use a router, to rewire my living room, to know what a flange is, and be able to use it in a sentence. “…Yeah, so I just used a number 6 flange on the hull, with a combination square and it came out perfectly.”

I’m not handy. At best, I’m thumby. Plus, I sometimes use my shoe for a hammer because I’m too lazy to dig through the tool box. But, being a do-it-yourselfer really appeals to my sense of order and thrift, which I wish I had, but don’t.

So yesterday I put shelves in our office closet. I could not find a stud to save my life (insert dirty joke here). Seriously. I found one stud right away, and then I kept tap-tap-tapping, and that didn’t work, so then I started putting nail holes in the wall to see if I could hit one. By the time I was finished the wall looked like I had transcribed War And Peace in Braille. But I did finally find two more, and used my wimpy .0002 volt cordless drill to install the…shelf-holding-thingys (that’s the technical term). They came out pretty well. They’d probably make Bob Villa weep, but they’ll serve their purpose.

My dog made putting up shelves very…well, you see, she has a problem with anxiety. My dog is anxious the way Smurfs are blue. She follows me every. where. If I walk across the room to turn on the light she follows me. So it was a little unnerving, what with all the steps I was taking around our tiny office, over boxes, and around the ladder, to also have to negotiate the large furry tumor under my foot.The other amazing accomplishment I accomplished was taking all the cords from my computer, and putting them through the hole in the back of my desk. Now this may not sound very exciting, BUT we have Broadband internet and phone, and I was taking a HUGE risk, because if I couldn’t figure out which cable went where, it would have meant being phoneless and internetless. I know– scary. It was just like a MacGuyver episode where you know if he snips the wrong wire on the bomb, L.A. will be blown to smithereens.