"Yeah, and big chainsaw hands!" - Captain Murphy, Sealab 2021

 

As far as power tools go, the one we saw on a flatbed a few months ago is a doozy, and, (I imagine) very good for trimming trees.

I went to the store the other weekend and bought a Pole Saw. Yes, the name would either indicate it was a misspelling of a side dish for a bratwurst (as in, “You want Slaw wid dat?”) or perhaps a saw best used for sawing up Polish people.

It is neither, though you could use it to saw up Polish people in a pinch.

It is an electric chainsaw. On a stick.

Yes, I know that the lawyers for Homelite® must have gone nuts when they saw that their product development engineers (who get PAID to make chainsaws) had decided to put one on the end of a ten-foot stick.

“Are you crazy? They’ll sue us.”

“Nah. It’s a chainsaw on a stick. How cool is that? Have a beer and throttle down, Mr. Wet-Blanket-on-our-Chainsaw-on-a-Stick.”

Apparently they had enough beers to get really, really incriminating pictures of the Homelite© lawyers, and so, I have and electric chainsaw. On a stick. It has a warning label that indicates that I shouldn’t take chainsaw on a stick closer than some specified distance to a power line. I think. It’s in metric, and the Olympics™ are over, so I guess I can just ignore anything in metric safely for another four years.

I took said chainsaw and began cutting at all the dead palm fronds from the palm trees out back. Thirty minutes and five trashbags of palm fronds later, well, The Boy and I were out of trash bags.

The Mrs. had quite the opposite experience last week. It seems that, while I can have a myriad of specialized tools for doing almost anything I can think of (router, band saw, grinder, table saw, about a zillion electric hand-held saws, electric caulk gun, drill press, hand held cordless drills) that the high-tech toys that you can buy to help clean a kitchen include a . . .

Brush.

Really. Oh, sure, there’s scrungie-backed-sponge, but that’s never good for anything besides being stinky on the back of the sink.

The Mrs. had spent hours scrubbing the grout on our tiles in the kitchen with that super-duper high-powered, er, hand brush. It looked good, what she had done.

Meanwhile, I’d taken a toilet brush, used my bandsaw to cut off most of the handle, and used it to give the toilet a nice, high-powered scrub that made it nice and porcelain shiny. It gave off that new toilet smell.

The Mrs. suggested I similarly modify a handled brush she had in the kitchen. Viola! In just three minutes (and a trip to the bandsaw and grinder) she was using my cordless drill to move at warp speed along the grout.

If the Soviets Chinese are going to defeat us, it’s because they give our women insufficient power tools for kitchen and housecleaning. Or, it’s because they begin to package cases of beer with each Pole Saw sold.

Note to statistics freaks: This is the 47th post wherein I mention chainsaws.