I was lucky in coming to Côte d’Ivoire as my wife arrived before I did and took care of a great many of the tedious things such as finding a house, buying furniture, and killing the cockroaches from the rainy season. I had to take on the fun things such as subletting our apartment in the US, bringing a meager ration of wine, Italian cured meats, and a proper toilet seat.

There’s just one problem in that you have one of two choices in furniture. The first is go the plastic route, which is great for those who enjoy white home furnishing that stick to you in the heat and will end up as landfill in short order. The other is to have your furniture built locally from the Ivoirian hardwoods. There is a very large industry of carpenters here. Some are pretty basic and others are amazing craftsmen that produce some of the finest wood work I’ve ever seen.

Our main working table and the chairs came from a fellow who definitely knew what he was doing, but had his own mind as to how to do it. For starters, the table was about 10cm too low. I couldn’t get my legs under it and after two weeks of doing everything on it from a sideways vantage, we finally had it raised a bit with some incredibly stylish new feet. That left the chair. Woe is the chair.

At first glance in the photo, it appears fine, but it is actually incredibly narrow. I have bruises on my hip bones from squeezing in and out of it, often forgetting the magic angle of approach to achieve seating bliss. Then of course, the arms are too low, but this was the case even when the table was lower, so I don’t get it. Then there is the fact my elbow starts bitching after a few hours of work, so I’ve “praved” a bit of a cushion there with some dish towel I found.

Why do I stick with this miserable contraption that gets up with me when I stand? Well, I’ve only got about four months left here at this point and it makes little sense to buy another chair, although the though has cross my mind. I’m sure it will cross even more forcefully if the chair were to collapse on me one day as it seems to be threatening to do. That and if we got two incredibly awesome chairs, we’d have a hard time not shipping them home when we leave.

A very mighty nod to Sean whose title I re-appropriated.

I’m always slowly adding to my praving gallery when I get the chance. It’s well known by anyone who reads my blog regularly and doesn’t make up the 90% of my traffic that are just stealing images, I love the prav. Things like this recent sunshade are a precious testament to half-assed fixes of mankind.

Naturally, once #1 Fan pointed me to There, I Fixed It, I nearly pissed myself. My collection seems paltry when matched to the brilliance of that site. If nothing else, it’s there to remind us that pravs took us to the moon and help with roasting hotdogs.

I’ve really enjoyed my Freedom Chair ever since buying it. Yeah, they’re freakin’ expensive, but what is the cost of your back worth to you? My back happens to be worth about $850 in a good chair to me.

The only really big catch with these chairs is that you can’t lock the back to prevent reclining and in turn, slouching. This has all kinds of side effects that aren’t good. The shoulders get messed up and if you already have bad posture like I do, things only get worse. I tried and tried to find a solution out there, but none seemed to exist, which is strange given that other models from Humanscale do allow the back to be locked.

So entered the prav. At first I came up with the crazy idea of drilling a hole on each side of the support and sticking a pin in these holes to allow the reclining back to be both locked and unlocked as they should have done in the original design. Quickly, I realized that this solution was too elegant (ie time consuming). Instead, I discovered that there are two plates on either side of the bar under the seat that are just above the recline pivot point. If you take a strand of two of bailing wire and wrap it through one of these holes on each side and then loop it around the bottom, it effectively stops the chair from reclining.

Keeping true to my praving roots, I made sure just to twist the wire ends together and leave some nice sharp edges that I’ll undoubtedly curse myself for creating whenever I go to move this chair some day. Because these are just three strands of 1.6mm wire under there, they’ll undoubtedly break eventually, thus requiring more wire to be added. Thankfully, the wire is cheap and of course if I ever want the recline back, I can just cut the wire. Overall, a prav well done.

Oh, in case you’re wondering why I didn’t use proxy bailing wire–a coat hanger, it’s because there was no way that I get the coat hanger to bend enough to pull it through. That and bailing wire is too soft. If one is out praving, there is a careful balance to be maintained which is to fix the thing just well enough to make sure that you won’t have to fix it again for a long time, although it will indeed need fixing again down the road because hey, you praved it.

Sometime back, I talked about the paramount importance of bailing wire to your modern pravs. The same holds true with it now as it did then. It’s a crucial element without which nothing can be slapped together. I mean really, why on earth would you weld or solder something, when bailing wire is so incredible simple, yet so fantastically powerful?

While there are many other elements that are key to your general praving arsenal (hammers immediately come to mind), there is the often overlooked tarpaulin or ‘tarp’. It’s a workhorse within the praving world community. It’s at once roofing, flooring, insulation, a sail, and every so often, actually just a tarp which you toss over some goods to keep them dry. In thinking about the tarp, I again turn to fond memories of my proud, praving father. On our small farm, we had many an item tarped. There would be small mounds around the property with something or other important being kept under a tarp. In theory, there should have been sheds and garages for these items, but why go to all that trouble when a tarp that costs $2 can cover in a matter of five minutes. Naturally, the big downside to the tarp is that they really do a crap job, they start to smell, leak and also deteriorate insanely fast through prolonged exposure to the sun. All of this was simply solved by adding another tarp. To this day, I am still digging up old shed foundations blue tarps from the ground whenever I try to organize things for my mom.

So, naturally, I could relate when I saw what you see below (direct link) which is a restaurant in Lower Pacific Heights that obviously got a leaky roof to which they decided to fix with… yup, a tarp. Let me add that this is not new. A Google Street Map from who knows when documented this prav-tarped roof long before I saw it last Saturday. Of course, it doesn’t help in the least that it’s a place called Pride of the Mediterranean, which is only fitting for the repair job that they did and goes a long way to explain how in the hell this place has a miserable 2.5 star rating on Yelp. I didn’t even know there was anything rated that low on the heavily skewed and practically useless Yelp, but I guess they didn’t want to pay Yelp’s blood money to get the reviews removed. Still, they undoubtedly get business from moronic friends from my hometown who go for the kitsch factor of grubby hookahs to smoke, but I digress.

I suppose the only really problem with the tarp and praving is that in developing nations where conflict has recently occurred, the tarp is actually a truly useful item. You’ll often see people living under them as they’re quick and cheap shelter that aid agencies can provide. So, there is no way I can completely scorn and ridicule the tarp as it has reached some form of hallowed ground for those in bad situations. However in the case of Pride of the Mediterranean and my father’s “inventions”, I have to curse the damned tarp in how easy a crappy fix it provides far and wide.

I haven’t talked about the praving because there really hasn’t been any of note lately. I didn’t encounter anything terribly interesting so I it has kinda stayed put. But then the issue of Spanish mops came in to the picture.

You see, Spanish mops are a good deal better at mopping than your standard American mop, especially the sponge mop, which is derided and ridiculed to no end by Spaniards touting the Iberian Mop Agenda. The only issue is that while it’s easy to toss a mop head or two in the suitcase when returning from a Spanish trip, it isn’t so easy to get them mounted on a stick in the US for use and sticks are too big to bring back from Spain. The threads are all out of whack because of this thing we keep refusing to use called the Metric System. So, giving up rather easy, the mops sat, sad and unused for endless months.

On the most recent Spanish trip for the holidays, I learned that the threads on the mop heads were somewhat ignored when it came to getting a particular head on a particular stick. Naturally, folks turned to the almighty prav, or as it is known in Spain, the chapuza. In this case, my mother in law showed me that it’s just a matter of keeping the hard plastic in a pot of boiling water long enough to get the plastic pliable and then force it on the stick.

This seemed simple enough and was one of the more elegant pravs I’ve seen, but in getting back home, I quickly found that it didn’t work. The stick was really too big to fit the head no matter how much time the head spent in a pot of boiling water. This required more desperate measures.

Digging deep in to the praving that courses through my veins and summoning up all pravosity, I came up with the idea that the plastic just needed to stretch more, which meant fire. Seeing as how I had recycled the stick from the previous sponge mop, I took advantage of the fact it was made out of metal and decided to heat it up in the flame from the gas burners on the stove. This only met with mild success as the mop head didn’t melt fast enough to allow the stick to attach before cooling to the point where it wouldn’t melt anymore. To get around this issue, I tool the bread knife and sliced down the horizontal axis of the plastic on the mop head. Then I heated up the stick again and shoved it in. It stuck. All was well, the prav seemed to work.

And work it did for about two minutes until the plastic that had melted cracked around the stick. I was back to square one until I decided that heavier artillery was needed and I got out my drill and a wood chisel. I took the chisel and fully split the shaft on the mop head. Then I took the drill and made a hole through the mop head that matched up with holes on the metal stick. When I put it together, it all lined up and I tried to use the pin that was left over from my sponge mop salvage. That worked for a minute, but the pin kept falling out. In typical praving fashion, I would have turned to bailing wire at this point, but I didn’t have any around. I used the second best thing in this case, which was to cut up an old clothes hanger, thread it through the hole on the stick and then give it a good twist to secure it. Did it work? Oh yeah, you betcha!

From this, I have learned two things. One is that the leaps and bounds in to which I’m becoming my father are terrifying. Secondly, I think I should probably start giving my “emergency contacts” a head’s up anytime I work on new pravs.