Tanya
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
I know, right? The 70s is when my name peaked. If you look at the bell curve for popularity of your name, there's not very many of us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Sure she was. I'm a 75 baby like you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
This summer. I'm getting scared. It's going to be great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
And huge. It happens to all of us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
I am in Utah in a oral surgery office of the man that this story is about. I'm working for my dad today.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
He is an oral surgeon. He pulls teeth. Perio, I think, is about gums. He still works. He's 84 years old. Wow. And he works on a semi-retired schedule. He's just finishing up his afternoon nap. Oh, what a stud. This is great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Okay, so this is a landscaping DIY disaster. A few things about my dad that you need to know is that he is a genius. But this is usually what gets him in trouble. He knows how to do things. He knows how to figure them out if he doesn't. He is big on self-sufficiency. His parents were World War II age vets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Another thing about his brilliance is he skipped out on the last year of college when he took his entrance exam into dental school because his scores were so high that they admitted him. Wow. Immediately. My dad has only ever paid for landscaping once in his life, and that was in the last 10 years. At 85, he still maintains five acres of land, and my mom, who's 80, mows the lawn.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
He will spend a dollar to save a penny. He's that kind of a person. And the same goes for his time. He will work an idea 100 times over. He's very persistent. He does not give up. Also, the last thing you need to know about our family is Saturday Chorday was an all-day thing. If you stayed the night at somebody's house, you had to be back in time for chores.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
If somebody stayed the night at your house, they either needed to leave or help out. There are eight kids in our family.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
But this story does not take place in Utah. I was raised in the Central Valley of California, San Joaquin Valley, outside of Fresno. This is 96 maybe. I'm home from college. My dad had a job for us to do for the summer. It included my older brother who was in college, myself, and my younger sister who was in college. So this is probably May. And we had a newish house.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We had built a pool the summer before. And now my dad is trying to landscape the backyard. In digging our pool, we found out that there is about 12 to 18 inches of what's called hardpan. It's thick concrete-like soil. You can't penetrate it. You can use a pickaxe all you want. You're never going to get to the bottom of it. But there is an orange grove in the back of our property.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
So how the heck did they get there?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
trees planted he finds out that you can get an ag permit for dynamite oh perfect now we're talking in the two acres that we have he would need to plant 60 trees so he figures out the recipe he researches how to do it he knows where to get all the stuff it's getting close to blasting day we had to rent an auger sure you gotta drill a hole and dump the dynamite in there
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We had to put like 30 inches down into the ground. That took three days to do all 60 holes. And it's blasting day. My dad took off work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
The only reason I know he took off work is that my two younger siblings were at school and my youngest sister was home with the chicken pox. We start in the far, far back part of our property, two acres. So pretty far. We put one scoop in. One scoop was about the size of a paint can, a small quart. My brother lights it. We all run. And there is a kaboom, like a howitzer cannon kaboom.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
So it was a little bit anticlimactic and no earth moved at all. Okay. It just shot straight out of it like a cannon. So dad being a Mr. Scientist, he treated it like a science experiment. We changed one thing. So some of the things we tried was stuffing it with a blanket to make it push out like a firecracker. We tried chicken wire in a blanket. We tried a big, huge boulder.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Things weren't working. So now we're increasing the number of scoots. We go to two. Oh, boy. We finally get up to three.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
This is like when you take too many drugs because the drugs haven't hit you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We're up to three scoops in the hole. My mom calls my brother and my sister and I that were home from college. We had to leave for an eye doctor appointment. We take off. Uh-oh. At the last second, she makes my little sister with the chicken pox come with us. She didn't want to leave dad experimenting with dynamite with a sick little girl inside. So he's doing it all by himself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We come home, country roads, everybody has a couple acres, and we're at our neighbor's house, and there are dirt clods everywhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
And the closer we get to our house, there's more.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We're getting scared. The closer we get to the driveway to the house, it's so much that my brother just undoes the van door, huge Mormon van door, by the way, And we bolt out of there and we just head towards the back of the property. And we're looking for body parts, honestly. Like, where is dad? Oh. So the hole back there is massive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Exactly. New spa. Dax, you could lay in the bottom of it with your arms outstretched and just be fine. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Then we hear some laughter coming from the inside of the house. And my other sisters were in there with my mom. And we go inside. My brother and I run over there. My dad is laying on the bed of his bedroom. There's a tarp on the floor. There's a ladder set up. There's a bucket of tools and a 12-inch hole in the ceiling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
It came through the house. It blew up in the air. Oh, my.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
It took about two weeks for him to finally tell the story. He was telling some tall tales all along the way. He was saying things like, oh, an alien must have come and tried to get me and the laser beam shot through the roof. Or I was kicking and screaming when the aliens were trying to get me and I kicked a hole in the roof. He's a little rascal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
He has a lot of different tall tales he tells, and Aliens is a favorite of his. A go-to. About two weeks later at family dinner, he finally fessed up to the whole story. With the three scoops in the hole, the boulder nearby, he had remembered there are these things called boosters or blasting caps that fit over the detonator. And it gives you maximum explosion with minimal amount of dynamite.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
And he is being pelted by all of these little dirt clods all around him. And he comes to and he sees the rock up in the sky. And the rock is pretty big, maybe 24 inches. Splits in two. One lands in the orange grove behind our house. And the other just gets swallowed up into the house. Oh, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Yeah. He never had anybody fix it. He tried to fix it himself that afternoon before we got home, but it was time for a nap. Just like he loves and he does his best thinking in nap time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
So we did finish up. We ended up only needing a third of a scoop through trial and error. I am shocked that we didn't blow all the windows out of our house from that first one because the rattle was so big. My brother heard it about a mile away after school, and he was just like, what is going on? Our neighbors called the cops on us, but he had a permit. He showed that cop exactly what he had.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Carry on, sir. Ha ha. Mind your own business.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We've got things under control here. And I think it was kind of exciting too. She was mad because her horses were losing their mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
We did get a twofer in that whole thing because that big old pit turned into a fire pit. Okay. All of our friends started calling him Dr. Boom Boom. Well, that's great. That's a great story.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Let me see if he's around. If you would like to meet this mad scientist.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
Give me one second. You got to come right now. Here he is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
When I told him we were going to do this, he said, I'll ask him if he wants to go for round two. Do you have any holes that need to be dug?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: DIY Disaster
No problem. Glad to share it. All right.