An old football injury rears its ugly head...er, face

Being a homeowner is not easy. Take my latest boggle for instance. My wife and i spent all day sunday wiring the living room and patio for surround sound. She spent the day in the attic stringing wire and passing the ends thru the ceiling or down the wall to the outlets where they plug into the receiver. I spent the day 30 feet up on a ladder precariously teetering above death so I got the full impact of contact when watching Fight Club. Enough to knock pictures off the wall. After a full day of this, we got to the point to having to just cut and strip the wire that ran from the wall outputs to the back of the receiver.

To preface this next part, you should know that i spent a year and a half in Lubbock wiring cars with new stereos and speakers for beer money back when i was 19. It's a very professional and defined process of sticking the ends of the wire in your mouth and stripping the plastic from the copper wiring.

So when i am wiring for new systems, these days, i always go back to my old days of drunken attempts of installation at four in the morning sitting in some coed's trunk. In doing this last night, i pulled my front tooth out.

Let me repeat that. I pulled my front tooth out.

Back in second grade (in the early 18th century), some kid elbowed me in the mouth while playing football on the playground and knocked out HALF of my front tooth. He chipped it at such an unusual angle that it didn't just knock out the whole thing, but just the bottom half. I've since lived with half of a real tooth and the bottom half being a fake. A compound of some type that was made to look like a real tooth. This never worked because my teeth aren't white. They are a marble color and the lower half of this tooth was always bright and sparkly white. Not very convincing.

So almost 20 years later, i inadvertently removed that compound with some speaker wire. It gave my wife a good laugh. For 20 straight minutes.

And now i look like i should be working on the Nascar circuit. Or killing possums...

edit: it's 2:30 pm now and i have a new tooth. Dr. A did a phenomenal job replacing it and i'm thankful.

and as an aside to previous jokes i made about Lowes and Home Depot, i figured out that i've spent $1800 in the last three weeks at both places.

And the 2006 Man of the Year goes to...