Yesterday, after more than 3 weeks of waiting, the contractor finally got around to repairing the gate opener where the dog chewed through it. I had to come up with some way of keeping the same thing from happening again.

The contractor had installed a piece of flexible blue conduit it over the wires but the dog just decided to go for the part that was exposed and only held in place with tape. So, I came up with the idea of using chicken wires and it looks like it might actually work.

As long as he can’t get his snout into the hexagonal shaped holes he should not be able to chew. Since the chicken wire flexes back and forth as the gate opens and closes, I’m hoping that the metal doesn’t start to break over time. If it does, I bought a 150′ roll.

Notice that there’s a white plastic stake which has one end of the chicken wire attached. This allow you to get to the controller box if needed to reset it or manually open/close the gate. The downside is that the manual pin to disconnect the arm is now behind chicken wire. We should only need to do that if the battery runs down or the wires get eaten again.

After spending from last Thursday to Tuesday morning without any Internet access, I’m back! Funny things is I thought of plenty of things I wanted to blog about when I couldn’t. Now I can’t remember any of them.

I did have the unusual experience of needing to work on stuff for my online classes that was due Monday night. So, I actually went to Panera Bread to use their free wi-fi. It was an interesting experience. It felt really laid back and I was totally comfortable there despite the college chick surfing myspace with her volume all of the way up. I wish that kind of stuff was around when I was working on my bachelor’s degree. The best we did was hangout at Denny’s and “study” (i.e. drink lots of coffee until they kicked us out when the bars let out at 2am).  LOL. Good times.