Wolf Dog ran out of food today. Rather, I let him run out of food.

You do not want a hungry 90-lb. German Shepherd around your house. Especially not when at least a couple of the residents can't climb trees yet.

The situation is more complex than it sounds. Regular Houseketeers will know that Wolf Dog eats raw meat. I started that more than a year ago when his teeth looked yellow and I learned it would cost nearly $200 to get them cleaned. Then I discovered raw-feeding and the local chicken-processing plant, and Wolf Dog thought we'd hit the lottery. Raw meat every day. Rittenhouse rules!

But I knew he was running low last Thursday night, and Friday was too busy to break away from work, and Squeeky will not touch the stuff. So, by Sunday morning, we were flat out of comestibles.

So I trudged up to Medium Box Grocery to see if I might luck into a clearance sale on drumsticks. Woot! Leg quarters in big plastic bags, $.39 a pound. I grabbed the last three.

Yes, raw-feeders are lunatics. We give people food to dogs, and we don't even cook it. We ignore the reassuring commercials from Iams, and the advice of veterinarians to buy the dog food only sold at vets' offices, and we feed our dogs exactly what dogs would eat if humans weren't around to manufacture kibble for them.

/rant

Wolf Dog thinks I'm a hero. 'Nuff said.

today I made a few preface gestures toward tearing out the ugly picture windows that have annoyed me since we bought this place six years ago. Aluminum-framed, single-pane, cloudy even when they're clean—I get mad just looking at them. I already have the replacements standing by out back, waiting for a rain-free day to install. I'll cover that in a separate piece.

Today's special moment, though, was going around the outside with a power screwdriver taking out all the fasteners I could without triggering actual collapse. The fasteners hold aluminum strips that secure the framed glass to the aluminum structure. They are tiny, rusty, sheet-metal screws suitable for a size of flat-tip screwdriver I only own one of, and because these were last turned during the Eisenhower Administration, my screwdriver blade sheared off almost immediately.

I got to thinking about fasteners.

Did they all start as the "slotted" variety, suitable for turning even with a thumbnail, dime, or pocketknife? You could always get one of those out no matter what you had on you.

Yeah, then that Phillips genius came up with the cross pattern, and made a fortune selling the only screwdriver that would fit. Then Allen bowled everyone over with his six-sided reverse-socket-head configuration, available in metric and Imperial measures. At least you could, in a pinch, fit the head of a small cap screw into it, then turn it with Vise-Grips.

General Motors was the first company I knew of to adopt the Torx, which everyone called the "star" pattern, and they used it only on headlamp housings, confounding mechanics nationwide. Then some fool put a dimple in the middle of the Torx and called it "security," as if thieves would never think to drop into a hardware store on their way to steal something. Oddly, the only place I see security-Torx is on playground equipment. Would jungle gyms be circulating like crack through the underworld except for the security Torx screws holding them in place?

Clever as they are, engineers will never create a fastener that can defeat a determined bathroom-stall disassembler. I don't know who goes into a public restroom with a toolbelt, determined to cripple the stall locks, but so far he's hit every airport and mall in the country. He can dismantle any toilet seat in seconds, while I can't crack a screw in a window frame with all afternoon at my disposal.

But I can use a chisel. We'll see if that proves necessary tomorrow, when the great Rittenhouse picture-window replacement derby begins.

Pull up a lawn chair and place your bets.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 07:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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