Fix It

Posted: August 29, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: | 5 Comments

Today is a rare day in my little world.  Carter is away on a school trip and other than my early morning trip to the trainer I purposely kept my day completely free.  Imagine the fun I could have.  With Russ at work and no one to answer to other than my sweet dog Shay I could do what ever I wanted– well, other than eat chocolate or cheese fondue.

 

The possibilities for excitement were endless and I did not disappoint myself.  What in the world did I do on my big free day, you ask?  I fixed everything that was broken in my house!  Maybe not everything, but most of the things that had been piling up for months awaiting a repair.

 

I know it sounds incredibly boring, but it has made me practically giddy.  I took my favorite reading glasses that had the lens held in by fishing line that had snapped into the optician and got them put back together good as new.

 

While on vacation in Maine my old beloved camera started acting sluggish so Russ ordered me a new battery.  Putting it in he dropped my camera and broke the battery door.  You would have thought he cut off my hand the way I acted about it.  He thought he was going to have to buy me a whole new camera, but today I found an honest to goodness camera repair store today and in a flash he replaced the broken part with a new one he had on hand, I never.  In this day and age to actually have an obscure part like that in stock is practically unheard of.  The camera still is acting sluggish, but I was able to leave it with this photo superhero who I have great confidence can fix it.

 

I noticed while taking a shower today that the drain was a little slow so I picked up enough Draino at Costco to unclog every pipe in my neighborhood and now the showers running free.  I’ve had a couple pairs of Russ shorts/pants that have needed mending sitting on my dressing table for a month so I whipped those up with a quick needle and thread.

 

None of these minor chores were difficult or time consuming but somehow they sat undone at my house with no excuse.  If I had known that getting them done would have given me a high very similar to eating chocolate I would have done them long ago.  Next time I am having a craving I’m going to look for something to fix.

Fix, Repair, Restore

Posted: May 7, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

 

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.