The following is a story without a moral...

Yesterday, I tried to set up the "Sky Chair" that Stacy bought at the Renaisannce Fair. For those of you not famliar with the latest in sitting technology (you didn't get this month's copy of Sit Mag?), the Sky Chair is basically a bunch of vinyl strung between heavy nylon cords, and separated by big wooden dowels meant to give your butt a place to go. For more info, see http://www.skychair.com/chair.htm and you too will be amazed by the ingenuity of this product, and by how daggone much it can cost to buy a bunch of nylon rope and vinyl strung together.

The Sky Chair comes complete with an eyebolt with a good eight inches of threading, and the girth of a sewer pipe, meant for hanging in your favorite eaves or tree. It occured to me that I'd love to hang it on the front porch. Wait...let me rephrase that...it occured to Stacy that I'd love to hang it on the front porch. Unfortunately, our front porch eaves are concealed by white aluminum siding, which gives me no indication of where the support joists are. So, being the responsible and protective husband that I am, I took a random guess at where it MIGHT be, drilled a hole, screwed in the eyebolt, hung the chair...and invited Stacy out for a sit. It took about eight seconds for the weight of a human in the chair to rip the plywood out of the roof, pull the nails out of the nearby support joist, and to send the aluminum siding and the chair (complete with passenger) to the concrete floor of my porch. Besides being horribly suprising to Stacy, it was the funniest thing I've seen in weeks. (No worries, we only hung the chair a few inches from the ground, in case such an event would occur...and the siding is very light, being made of aluminum and all). Eight seconds after I had hung our ideal sitting solution for the modern home, I now had an sizeable restoration project on my hands, and a wife with a sore coxyx. (Say it out loud, it's fun).

I managed to hammer the support plywood back in, attach it to the joist, bend the aluminum back into place and...after a couple of guesses, drilled a hole right into the support joist, where the chair now hangs. Stacy, in an act of courage and a symbolic middle finger to classical conditioning, got back in the chair to test it. It held her...and it held me...and that's a feat.

We now have a teriffic sky chair which, assuming nobody steals it this afternoon, will provide hours of floating sittiness for me later today. And, we have some extra ventilation in our porch roof.

This concludes a story without a moral.

Peace,
Justin