Friday at home

I have a four-day weekend, and it's fabulous. So far I've done something, and something else. Whatever those things were, they gave me a nice glow of accomplishment. The weather is hot, with a good breeze to keep the skeeters off. We have Mexican pineapple pop and vanilla ice cream. Life is good.

We've been working on a job list for the hired man, a nice young fellow who is a friend of someone in the garden club. I want him to take the tall ladder and tack up some plastic over the exposed insulation in the entryway. So I go to the gym to gather materials. Roll of visqueen, check. Staple gun is harder. We have six or 10 of the things, and boxes and boxes of various sizes and shapes of staples. We have so many because I collect tools because I lose tools and because I like tools. (If you have a dozen hammers, you can probably find one when you need it even if the idiot who last used it didn't put it away.) I buy them at estate and yard sales because cheapness is wired into my genes, and because hippies never buy anything new (it's just wrong).

The red staple gun, our top machine for probably 20 years, has thrown a spring and we can't find the spring. OK. The hammer stapler died during the reroofing of the barn. Can't find even the carcass. There's a big silver one that looks good. It's an Arrow, though, and I don't see any Arrow staples. Plus I can't figure out how to put the staples in. If you've ever had a staple gun, you know how it is. There is no standardization among staplers. Some of them have floppy levers on the bottom, some have swiveling panels at the front, and some have to be opened with a hammer and are then very hard to close. I turn the thing around in my hands, poking at protuberances and twisting panels.

C. appears while I am trying to pick the Arrow open, so I pass it to her. She's clever at this and very patient, hardly ever resorting to the hammer. I go to pull more staplers from the top drawer, and – crap, the drawer is jammed. Opens maybe half an inch. Jiggling the drawer does not help. I'm reaching for the pry bar when C. intervenes. “You'll just make it worse,” she says. It's true – first I'll make it worse, then I'll break it. Works for me. She pokes various items in the drawer, trying to knock the jammy bit loose. It's hopeless. The handle of a stapler is jammed up against the drawer frame. I convince her to work on opening up the Bostitch so I can make the jammed drawer worse, then break it, while she is distracted. Works like a charm.

That lever pops the bottom on this Wards stapler.

We have a few boxes of Bostitch ammo.

The Arrow has a hatch in the back.

The nose opens on the Bostitch.

We end up with two working staplers with ammo. The others go into a pink drawer on a tool shelf. Hippies never throw anything away.

Gnarly old model with knob.

Store clerks used to staple bags closed with these.

The coolest thing in the stapler drawer is this glazier's model, which fires a little galvanized diamond into a window frame, holding the glass in tight.

The glazier's point shoots out the front of this gadget.

Looks like you load the points under this bar. 

Well, that was interesting (for me). Later in the day we got two new alpacas.