In several days, I’ll be 83. During my journey down my yellow brick road of life, I have noticed various idiosyncrasies. One of the positive idiosyncrasies is that when confronting a problem, whether large or small, I accept the dilemma without wasting time dissing what has befallen me. Problems are viewed by me as being neutral.

I don’t decry having to address a vexing issue. I don’t know when I adopted that behavior. Nevertheless, it has been with me for several years. Even when I fail at resolving the dilemma, my mind seems to be attracted to continue to find a resolution to the issue.

This is a recent example of this beneficial idiosyncrasy of mine. I have a privacy fence atop the railing around my deck. I put it up years ago. As the months turned into years, it has weathered the storms of wind, rain, and snow. Each additional year, I noticed that it was aging more and more rapidly as I am.

What forced the issue to the forefront of my life was that the weather recently has very strong gusts of wind several times each week. In the middle of winter, I realized that my aging privacy fence needed to be replaced. It was just a matter of time before it noticeably started to fall apart slowly.

So, I removed the metal decorations first and then started to remove the fence.

The next part was far more taxing and difficult. It wasn’t easy to rip it off the old privacy fence.

The next step was to create the first half of the privacy fence.

The new privacy fence is all metal and is about 7 feet high and 8 feet long. Also, it is connected to the floor of the deck and not the railing. Obviously, the fence bolted down to the deck’s flooring would be more secure than the old wooden one on the railing.

Then, all that I needed to do was to tighten the nuts on the bolts that are drilled through the deck’s flooring.

It should be noted that I fell off that red ladder in 2008 precisely in the same place, hitting my head against the retaining wall. I was in a local hospital’s ICU for a month recovering from a subdural hematoma as a result of cracking my head against the retaining wall. I was very careful this time.

Since the privacy fence consisted of two 4-foot-wide panels butted against each other, I needed to think through the process of bolting each vertical panel together separately. So, I bolted the left vertical panel together. Then, I laid the right panel flat on the deck and bolted it together.

All that I had to do was to stand up the panel, double-check the small bolts, and slide it to its position next to the other panel.

Finally, success.

But wait.... That’s not the whole story.