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My Profile
She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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12:53 p.m. - 2008-03-07
Okay, I totally rock. Recently I fixed the damper on my furnace's exhaust. Not a huge big if you know what you're looking for, but confounding and expensive to non-furnace people. We're talking a $300 service call where the guy goes downstairs, unsticks the damper wing, and jiggles the rotator arm to make sure the wing tips properly and then spends 2 hours banging on your ductwork and running out to his truck 'to get parts' (he's really calling his bookie and laying an extra C-note on the Duke game thanks to you and your sticky damper), all the while the poor chilly family is upstairs praying they don't have to sell their youngest daughter to pay for the service call. I thought about playing it like that to impress Mick, but he was impressed enough by having the heat back on in like 5 minutes. No need for ductwork banging. Wonder Princess came to the rescue, fixed the furnace, and still managed to lay out a 4 course dinner without missing a beat. So last night when the dishwasher went toe-up and Mick came to me all cheese faced and trembling because he'd stopped it mid-cycle to put his yogurt bowl in and it wouldn't start again and now there was a (dunt dunt dun) Red Blinky Light lit on the control panel!!!! I patted and calmed him and said the dishwasher would be just fine. And it is. Not quite the easy fix the furnace was, this one involved scooping out a gallon of greasy water, dismantling the drain plate, plunging the line, getting all the glop out of the filter and fitting everything back together again. Plus convincing my very persnickety precise Swiss dishwasher it was really allowed to start the whole cycle over and nobody would tattle on it to the home office. (The Swiss apparently don't believe in shirking or do-overs. Then again the tidy Swiss probably would never make a dishwasher eat as much crap as my family feeds ours. Despite my pleas my guys don't even scrape the plates, let alone rinse them.) Anyhoodle, I'm working hard here to give myself snaps. It's that weird egalitarian thing of mine where I think that because I can do something everybody can. Mick's terrified cluelessness over our broken stuff reminds me that no, not everybody can fix a furnace or service a dishwasher. Also a struggle is not gaping at my beloved and thinking him an idiot and/or a disappointment because he is completely without fix-it abilities. And it's not really as sexist as it could be, Mo calling a service guy to make a house call to unclog her vacuum hose got the same eye-roll from me. "Yo, Ms Spendthrift, untwist a wire hanger and fish the sock out of the hose yourself! While you're at it, get all the crud out. Knock the stuff loose with the hanger and then shoot through the hose with the blow dryer before you put it back on the vacuum." *Kids, be sure to put the other end of the hose in a deep trash can before turning on the blow dryer or you'll have a mess. Mostly I've come by my fix-it knowledge because I have always been poor. Poor people don't call service guys. Poor people don't throw broken stuff out and buy new shit either. At best I might be able to afford parts for my broken things, but no way could I ever afford the labor or to replace stuff outright. Ergo the need to figure out how to do take care of my broken things myself. For a long time if I got in a jam I settled for helping Mike finish fixing my stuff, but since I'd rather run darning needles through my eardrums than call my ex anymore I've really stepped up and learned to get it all done on my own. Thus stubborn pride and an empty wallet conspire keep this princess's fingernails broken and black.
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