Friday, August 17, 2007
The Screen Door
(1)
I finally got around to getting a close-up photograph of the damage to the screen door. After the damage I moved the safety pin up about an inch, and we have been using it in this position since then. The photo was taken without a flash. A paper towel was taped over the area to provide a light contrast.
There are two forms of damage: cutting damage on the left and stress damage on the right. It is possible that Kootch or I did the stress damage, but the cutting was done by a person or persons unknown, probably using diagonal pliers (dikes). The intruder had to have climbed up onto the patio, the floor of which is about 7 feet off the ground. (later:) Kootch tells me that she caused the stress damage as she tried to separate the two safety pins whose 'heads' had become entangled at the time of the incident. Apparently she did not want to set off the alarm by pulling too hard on the 'lanyard' and so pulled the screen out of shape as she disentangled the 'heads.' (I later 'improved the design' by rotating the fixed safety pin 180 degrees. There has been no entanglement since then.)
Kootch's denial was shaken by the incident and she stopped cooling the living room for a week or so, but began doing it again at my request. I just now told her not to do it tomorrow morning because I don't want to kill anybody while I am hungover. She smiled knowingly and confided that she had already reached that conclusion.
