Too many fleurs-de-lis?!1 & predictably, something ungracious WELCOME this way comes!1

So at a farm and ranch hardware store, there were plenty of ornamental items, gate bells with horses, horse shoes, roosters, dogs, deer, and on and on. Well, over in a pile was this outlier item, a fleur-de-lis, which fit my mundane pretentions, mundane since the fleur deal is an ancient cliché. Fine, that was a year ago. From the beginning the "WELCOME" rubbed me wrong for reasons that some might surmise. So I kept it lying around, far down the list of things that don't get done, just cluttering up the how-to-fix-this synapses. So finally a month ago I set out to hop to it, first trying a hack saw to cut the word out, thinking to leave the two sections like a two prong fork. Well, this is apparently cast iron, so no, got an eighth of an inch on. So tried drilling a starter hole for some kind of metal cutter and did make a hole but the bit, whadayacallit like a chain saw, jammed and the whole slab of cast iron twirled like a dervish and fairly assaulted me as it frizbeed off around the room. So, what, the answer is a WELDER, no? So went to one, the first of two, and these dudes turned out to be a type unto themselves -- intelligent, funny, edging into "eccentric," like the line in a movie where the old prospector says, "I'm eccentric. When you live out here alone, you get ECCENCTRIC." Well, he wasn't counting on somebody like me and went into STUNNED mode when I said I wanted to cut the "WELCOME" out. So he said what I wanted was a plasma cutter, that he would be getting one in a couple of weeks, so three weeks later he didn't have it and referred me to Welder #2, who was similarly engagingly whacked. This one had a shop with several employees, the whole place humming along in order, and he had a street sign over the entrance that read, "ASSHOLE ROAD". He, the boss, joked along before getting his assignment from me, and like the other one was flabbergasted at my request, but recovered immediately, laughing, "Why, you're a grouchy old man just like me!1" (He's in his late 40s, or 50s tops.) But he hopped to my biding. We joked while he did the plasma in about 5 minutes. I said I had just encountered these two welders and you guys are intelligent and witty. He said, "When you work hard, you have to laugh or go crazy. And we don't do it with everybody, just when the customer has a sense of humor."

Fine, so the word was gone. But a week went by and it didn't feel right. Yes, that empty space bespoke the obvious, that something was missing. Welder #1 had said he could spell out my surname and weld it in there, but I didn't want that. Neither the place name of the family or such. The worst perception of others would be that imagination was lacking for that empty space. So further cutting was indicated, but going back to the welders might lead them to upgrade their estimation of me from NUTCASE to CAUSE FOR CONCERN. So I explored a big box store for a possible cutting wheel to go on the electric drill, like an enlarged Dremmel tool, and after not being understood, we found there really is such a thing. End game: I did this part myself then went to Welder #1 to weld the scroll part under the fleur part, then drilled the holes in the fence post.

Seems a bit cluttered with fleurs.

[IMG][/IMG]