Hockey Pat Goes Through A Door

I believe I have told you about Hockey Pat.To refresh your memory, Hockey Pat is the person that my very nice, very mild-mannered, very friendly, very easy-going husband turns into when he loses his temper. Kinda like how Edward Norton is this pretty cool scientist in Brazil (have you seen this movie?) and then he turns into a big green angry guy. Hockey Pat got this name because he first emerged in a hockey game when all of a sudden Pat starts pummeling someone from the other team, most likely for perceived overly-rough play against me. Luckily his balance on his skates is not quite as good as it could be and the other player probably didn’t even notice the blows coming his way. :) Every once in a while Hockey Pat emerges in places other than ice arenas. Places like the entryway to our house.

Our house is old. My dogs and I are admittedly hard on a house. These two things lead to various issues of the falling-apart variety around the old homestead. One of these issues includes our front door (and the sliding glass door and back door, too). The locks are weak, the frame is weak, the door doesn’t always shut tight, the deadbolt will barely open with a key, etc. One day Pat came home and the door was stuck. He had successfully unlocked all the locks, but the screws from the lock mechanism were stuck in the door frame, or something like that. Maybe he had a bad day at work or maybe he had too much caffeine or maybe not enough caffeine, but instead of patiently jiggling the door a bit until it opened, he broke through the whole door jam.

Yep...shattered the door frame. See?

And then he went to get a hammer to try to get the screws back in place (does this even make sense? perhaps I have the story wrong?) and he got more frustrated and started beating the shit out of the door frame. See the hammer marks? I'm pretty sure the whole episode was accompanied by some choice cuss words as well. I find this all to be quite hilarious now, but if I had been home at the time I'm sure I would have been really mad. Good thing I wasn't home. I'm enjoying the laugh!!

Last weekend, Pat and his dad worked on the door for two straight days - most of the day on Saturday and ALL day on Sunday.

While it still doesn't look so pretty yet, we do have a door that doesn't stick! And it unlocks easily. And most importantly in this stalker-filled world, it locks!! And an extra bonus - the new handle for the door is too deep and interferes with the screen door handle. This makes it seem as if the house is locked when it's not because the screen door handle can't go down anymore...only up. (What a bonus!) No more guests walking in without knocking! (Unless they just read this and learned the secret!)