Home & Garden

As we stood over the box of spilled ceiling fan parts, My Lovely Wife reading the instructions over and over again like it's the Da Vinci Code while I chewed my fingernails down to bloody stumps, something occurred to me.

I have no business owning a home.

There should be a law, or at least a multiple-choice test involving Scantron sheets and a No. 2 pencils that could gauge whether nincompoops like me were safe enough to even attempt home repairs.

You need a license to drive a car and to catch a fish. You need a permit to own a gun or dig a swimming pool.

And yet no agency official, no city ordinance exists, to stop me from standing on a ladder in my own home and guessing like a baboon playing blackjack if it's the green wire or the yellow wire that's supposed to serve as the "ground" wire.

Oh, by the way … the wires poking out from the gaping hole above my head, the ones that could determine whether the fan blades turned, delivering the blessed gift of cool air to my baby's nursery; the wires that would illuminate the darkness beneath which Jellybean will one day learn to read. The wires that, if mismatched could turn my cozy home into a raging inferno worthy of Dante — those wires were neither yellow, nor green.

They were black and black.

And to think, this was the fan the blue-vested dude at Lowe's promised my wife was "easy as could be" as long as you're replacing what's already there.

We were.

'Course, it wasn't until we got the thing open and packing popcorn scattered like snow across the carpet that we got to the part in the instructions that read, "…can be extremely trying. Use patience and caution." This word of warning was for those who chose to wire this whirling dervish of death via the remote control. We were not of that persuasion.

As a general rule, I avoid anything that's "extremely trying" for I have no "patience." That's why I don't play Sudoku and have been known to hurl uncooperative vacuum cleaners from the patio to the ground with embarrassing glee.

Trouble was, assuming one wanted the ceiling fan to actually work rather than looking like a piece of abstract art, the remote control hookup was a necessity. The fan had no pull chords.

Still staring at all the parts as afternoon turned into evening, My Lovely Wife and I consulted the Yellow Pages, found a licensed handyman and for a nominal fee were soon rocking Jellybean in cool comfort. All without a single voice raised or lone hole punched through sheet rock.

To many manly men, having to admit defeat and pay good money to a professional stands as some sort of character flaw. They would rather waste a lifetime of afternoons cussing and stomping around the house until they've done more harm than good.

Not me. I learned long ago — know your limitations. Mine happen to be anything involving math, money or the involuntary use of power tools. Still, long as we're able to make that house payment every month (and by "we," I mean my wife … see limitation number two), I am an actual homeowner and there's no law against that — least not yet.