Rule of Law, not Rule of Men

I just crawled out from under another sink replacement.  There's nothing like plumbing in a moderately old house to remind me of Drinkwater's Law, to wit:

You're never done until you've used every tool in the garage.

This law was formulated circa 1978, when I found myself using one soldering iron to solder a connection in a bigger soldering iron.  A motley collection of other tools lay about me.  I had originally set out to tighten a loose chair leg.

Unfortunately for us tool-freaks, there's an even more depressing corollary:

Buying new tools makes things worse, not better.

These and their co-conspirators lead to Hofstader's Law, with its lovely self-reference:

Everything takes longer than you think it will, even if you take Hofstader's Law into account.

So you have to make another trip to the HW store anyway, since (naturally) one and only one of the six  faucet connectors you bought is a half-inch too short.  There, starting in the parking lot, you are reminded of this fact (attributed to various, but I like the claim of Einsteinian origin):

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity.

The surround of Stupidity leads to musings on yet another rule:

Ignorance can be cured; Stupid is forever.

Thoughts of ignorance and the possibility of its cure drive one on, to this variation on Parkinson's Law, suitable for parents of a certain age:

Tuition expands so as to slightly exceed the family budget's ability to pay it.

Parenting issues remind me of a failed law, one of the very few:

One child takes up all your time.  Two children take up all your time.  Therefore, it's the same amount of work to have two children as to have one.

(I claim to have also invented that one, but since Drinkwater's Law already existed, it remains nameless.)

The numbers One and Two lead naturally to Three, and therefore to:

The three most useless things to a pilot are 1) Runway behind you, 2) Fuel left in the fuel truck, and 3) altitude above you.

(Damn.  I wrote that line just a day or two before the Asiana 777 "landed" very short at SFO.  Memo: go to BCP to donate blood.)

Thoughts of flight remind me of a more soothing bit of advice, not a rule exactly, but good advice:

Try to fly in the soft middle of the air.  Avoid the edges where it can be hard and jaggy.

Fine all-purpose advice for avoiding life's little reef's and lee-shores (to mix metaphors a bit).