Fix, Repair, Restore

Pardon the expression, but up keeps a bitch.  Our house is a little older than I am, but we both are at the point in our longevity where we are all about maintenance.

The house is easier than I am because we have Joe, our builder, fixer, miracle worker who doubled the size of our house, reworked rooms in our house and fixed just about everything that ever went wrong with our house with the expertise of a fine craftsman and the care of a beloved family member.  Little did we know when we chose Joe to do our first addition that we were ensuring that we would have him as our lifetime handy man.

Russ and I save up all our around the house repairs for when Joe is between bigger jobs.  He is a little like Eldon from “Murphy Brown.”  We like having him around that we find things for him to do.  Joe is so old school that when something needs fixing he does it right.

Right now he is taking care of our 60 year old shutters with peeling paint and rotting wood.  Most fix-it types would have told us to throw the old wood shutters out and replace them with plastic, but not Joe.  He has lovingly removed each one to paint and with Russ’ Internet search expertise, found a forge to supply us with replacement hinges for the ones that were rusted out.  Even the forge was old school, sending us $400.00 worth of custom made materials with a note to send them a check back.  Have you ever?

Somehow I scheduled all my personal upkeep for this week too.  I had my dental cleaning yesterday where my hygienist asked me how much tea I drink.  Tea is my last vice, I told her and I was willing to live with less than perfectly white teeth as long as I got to drink tea.

Back in February my gym had a casino night and I was the third best gambler there. So today I finally got around to having my black-jack-winning massage.  The masseuse asked me what I did for a living that kept my shoulders so hunched up?  Being a magazine editor on sabbatical sounds very lame in relationship to my poor posture.  I considered lying and telling her I was a surgeon leaning over children on the operating table.  After my treatment today my new pretend job needs to be prima ballerina so I stand tall with my head up straight and shoulders down.

My third upkeep comes Friday with the greatly anticipated colonoscopy.  If I calculate this correctly I will have spent about 30% of my week on personal upkeep.  I am quickly coming to see what retirement holds for me, more work than I do in regular life.  Next time someone tells you they are retired don’t envy them for the non-work they are doing, they are probably spending more time repairing and maintaining than they ever spent creating.