The Batroom is Outside

One evening my wife mentioned that the bats weren't flying around our yard eating insects like they once did; and wouldn't it be nice if I built a bat house like the one she had clipped out of a magazine.
When I agreed without argument, she eyed me suspiciously.
Naturally, my first order of business was to fire off a mail order for more power tools. As a veteran home handyman, I knew if I had the right tool for the job, anything was possible. I also found it a lot easier to hand that "right tool" to the repairman when he arrived to un-do my initial handiwork.
A week later, the entire contents of several pages of the Sears tool catalog appeared on my doorstep. Now I was prepared to handle anything that required cutting, drilling, nailing, smoothing, or shaping wood. In theory, anyway, and providing nobody at the power company accidentally unplugged the frayed extension cord that serves our rural neighborhood.
I was adjusting the bright red suspenders that supported my new fifty pound tool belt when a booklet that came with the tools caught my eye: "What Every Novice Handyman Should Know." Well I was no novice, but I picked it up, hoping there was a chapter entitled "Overcoming Spousal Power Tool Resistance." There wasn't. The book's author kept harping on things like planning, safety precautions, and reading directions. Well, I didn't want to waste time on stuff like that!
I drove my sports car to the lumberyard to get some wood for my project. A burly lumberjack-type employee was lounging near a pile of sawdust when I arrived. He smiled at me and I noticed that he had about as many teeth left as he had fingers. Seven or eight of each, I think. I didn't want to stare, even though he was taking a good long look at my new suspenders and tool belt.
"I need some wood," I said forcefully.
"Can you be a little more specific, Chief?"
"Not really. Just wood. I need some regular wood."
"That's different from the unleaded kind, right?"
"Look, I'm building a bat house . . ."
"Quite a project, a bath house. Sure you don't mean a bath room?"
"No, no, a bat house for flying bats. You know . . ." And I began flapping my arms and baring my teeth, presumably looking like a 150 pound bat wearing a plaid shirt and fifty pound tool belt.
"You know sir," he said as he backed away, "I just spotted a whole stack of regular wood over there."
I must have made a bat impression on him.
The construction itself went smoothly, if I ignore the times when some stray parts were accidentally glued or nailed to the workbench.
A bat house is kind of like a bird house, except there is no door and no floor. The floor is the door. The bats fly in the open bottom and fall asleep while they hang upside down by their rear claws.
I painted the bat abode to match our house and proudly mounted the thing up above our front door and under the eaves. It was a neighborhood conversation piece. Soon everyone was pointing at it and whispering to each other.
The thing I liked about the project was that it was simple. For example, bats don't need indoor plumbing. With the open floor arrangement they use a primitive gravity flow system for eliminating wastes: everything drops straight down. The porch, however, is quite a mess most mornings.
My wife insists that the instructions warned about that.
"Why won't men ever use directions?" she asked.
"But I did use them," I insisted.
And I did, several times . . . to wipe glue off my hands and to mop up paint spills.