Santa is Still a Big, Fat Jerk

Yesterday, I spent a good five hours acquiring Evan's Christmas present (and, because I had to use my Dad's truck instead of my Prius, about $60 on filling my dad's gas tank). Today I spent another couple of hours after supper beginning the process of putting together the thirty million pieces of cedar, steel and plastic. My dad and I started work on the slide section (phases 1 and 2 of the 19-phase project) tonight. This involved drilling holes in a flexible green sheet of plastic and then bolting the piece of plastic to a piece of wood. That was actually pretty easy. It wasn't until we tried to fit the piece of plastic into narrow grooves that snaked their way down the sides of the slide that things got fun. We finally got the plastic sheet that is the actual slide stuck into its side pieces and had started to screw the sides into the plastic sheet when we realized that we'd forgotten the little wood support pieces that fit into notches in the middle of the slide. That meant a trip back to my house (we'd taken the slide pieces to my dad's workshop where we had better light) to get the missing pieces, unscrewing the few spots we'd finished, taking one end apart, inserting the wood pieces, and finally getting the plastic sheet back into place. After that, we didn't have any major gaffes, but I'm sure tomorrow will bring more when we try to get the rest of the set finished. Still, if this took this long, I don't want to thing how long I'll be out in the back yard playing Mr. Handy Man tomorrow.