Several months ago I took an old fourteen foot gate, cut it down to twelve feet and welded it back together. Yesterday, I finally decided to hang the thing…by myself. We’ve recently built a new shop, and in all the electrical swapping around, the power is temporarily disconnected from the barn. Do you know what that means? Exactly! I could not use the big electric drill, and since I had the “gate hanging anointing”, I decided to use my daddy’s old portable drill.

Remember this thing? It worked really well, and I hung the gate.

There was just one problem.

The things that the gate hung on had to be screwed into a 2 x 4 (part of the frame for my chicken pen) that was nailed to a pole. When the hanger went through the 2×4 to the pole, it pried the 2×4 loose at the top – which meant that I was going to have to take the gate off, unscrew the hanger, reattach the 2×4, and drill the hole deeper.

At that point, I was dangling on the edge of being over- heated and had developed a case of anal glaucoma (I just couldn’t see my rear end working one more minute as hot as it was). After all, tomorrow would be another day, right?

So this morning, I collected my daddy’s portable drill and went down to make another lap with the gate. I took it off the hangers, took the top hanger out, nailed the 2×4 back to the pole, and drilled the hole deeper. Everything was going like clockwork until

the bit broke off in the pole. So… I pried the 2×4 away from the pole, pulled out the bit, reattached the 2×4 and screwed the hanger back in. All I had left to do was hang the gate, which had been a real task the day before. Because the gate is so long, it is not easy for one person to manipulate. Besides that, it had been run over and wasn’t exactly straight. But, because I was determined to complete this mission alone, I turned that gate every which way but loose. I raised one end up on stone,

and sprayed Liquid Wrench . Then I realized that if this task was going to be completed in any reasonable amount of time, I would have to do the unthinkable. That’s right, I called for help,

and they came. In about a minute and a half,

the mission was accomplished.

I wanted to attach some wire to the gate to keep critters from slipping between the pipes, so we went to Tractor Supply. I found wire in the width that I needed, but it came in 100 foot rolls that cost sixty bucks. I only needed 12 feet. When Joel said, “Well, aren’t you going to get it?” I replied, “No. I think I’ll just get a new gate.” Sometimes… you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don’t.