Today’s Cavalcade of Fail will involve going over to my brother’s house and helping him rebuild his deck, which is currently in the no-particular-skill-needed “demolition” phase.  His deck is rotten and nasty and has been since he bought his house and he’s apparently finally gotten tired of it, so the old deck is getting ripped down this week and the new deck is slated to get rebuilt on Saturday.

I am hoping beyond all hope that we’ll find out that the structure underneath the deck is sound and that what went wrong with the previous one is just that the owners failed to properly waterproof the thing.  He claims that that may be the case based on what he’s already torn up; if I’m right than all we should have to do is pull up the old boards and then screw new ones into the old structure.  If the old structure isn’t sound then this is going to be a much more complicated process and we are almost certainly going to do it terribly wrong.

Frankly I’ll be perfectly happy if I manage to make it through today without injuring myself; we’ll worry about Saturday on Saturday.

At least y’all will have a story about how I badly injured myself to look forward to.

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Memo to Guitar Center:  I know you like having the lots of merchandise near the floor thing and the whole crowded aisles thing; your store is niche enough that you’re never going to have a thousand customers in there at one time and it’s cool to have stuff everywhere to look at and apparently the whole “labyrinth” approach to your floor layout appeals to something in your corporate culture.  I’m good with that.

Maybe, though, if you’re going to have $800 guitars, you don’t set them so that if you take half a step backwards while trying to look at a harmonica that is pegboarded a foot off the ground you bump into that $800 guitar and almost knock it onto the floor, causing employees to shriek at you OH MY GOD DON’T MOVE  while they rush over and rescue the precious piece of inventory before it slides off of your back and hits the ground.  Especially when said $800 guitar is, for no clear reason, nowhere near any other guitars and hanging perilously to begin with.  I cannot possibly have been the first person to bump into this goddamn thing.  Make better layout choices, please.  I shouldn’t be able to describe any part of a retail store as a booby trap, y’know?

Heh.  Booby.