Snapshots: October 2010

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Ananda's Great Fall or the Case of the Missing Stud

We were in the process of covering Ananda's cage for the night with a bed sheet when the bottom fell out of our canary's world.

Ananda, his cage, and the bracket that was holding it up on the wall all came crashing down onto the floor.

Ananda ended up at the bottom of the cage with a plastic food dish on his head.

Peggy thought he was dead.

But he is a tough little dude and like the football players he watches on TV, he shook it off.

Then he spent the night in his cage on the counter in the bathroom while we tried to figure out what happened.

Our thorough-going accident investigation revealed that in our exhausted and brain dead state when we moved here two months ago, we failed to hit a wall stud when we drilled the holes for the bracket that holds Ananda's cage.

Two short screws in 80-year-old plaster were all that kept Ananda from disaster.

After two months, the added weight of a single bed sheet was enough to bring the whole contraption down.

Not being real do-it-yourselfers, we Googled the question "How do you locate wall studs?"

Basically, in a place built circa 1920, who knows?

So we proceeded to probe for wall studs by driving in a nail and seeing if we hit wood. (Who knew it would be so hard to find a stud in Hollywood.)

Our hit or miss method transformed several feet of wall into a dart board before we finally found a stud. (The studs turn out to be the standard 16-inches, so the long dead carpenters who built this place were following some standards, maybe better standards than they use today, since this building has survived three major L.A. earthquakes.)

Anyway, Ananda's cage bracket is now secured into an 80-year-old two-by-four and he is back doing what he does best: singing and eating, as shown in this snapshot.