I Fix…I Dig…Ok, Maybe not so much…

I’m back from DC!  Exhausted as all get out, but it was a great weekend.  Lots of learning, lots of fun, and the company was top notch! 

I’m still playing catch up from last week though.  It was a full week of life, and flubbers, and gearing up for going out of town…all while the Hubs was in Atlanta.  I think tomorrow I’m due for something awesome like a pedicure.  Yeah…that’ll probably happen in all my free time.

Don’t you love how you can almost guarantee that when your husband is gone, something in the house will inevitably break or go wrong?!

The Hubs and I got married a month before I turned 25, and so that basically meant that I had been out of college and living alone for 3 years before we got hitched. In that 3 years time, I got pretty good at fixing when things needed to be fixed for the most part. When you’re on your own, you become pretty accustomed to making things work and fending for yourself.

Then I said “I Do.”

I don’t know about all of you, but there are just things that my husband does better than me. So, I’ve pretty much completely abandoned some of those things that I once had a basic knowledge of… in favor of letting him just take care of it. That goes specifically in our household for things like electronics, mechanical moving parts, computer maintenance, anything involving the septic system or sprinklers. I don’t know really anything about any of those things anymore.  So around here, it seems that somewhere in “I Do”… actually, “I Don’t.”

My husband is adamant right now that I note that “anything involving a shovel” is also not my bag. I, however, beg to differ. Recently, I thought it would be a good idea to dig up the concrete mass that had once upon a decade ago held a basketball goal at the end of our driveway. The Hubs had been avoiding it, and about 3 days before our Easter Egg Hunt, I decided while he was out of town that the 1 inch metal remains sticking up (tetanus waiting to happen) needed to come out. I got a shovel and went to work. What I didn’t realize until after I’d started digging though was that the concrete mass went down deep enough to practically touch the earth’s core. I dug for well over and hour, almost broke one shovel (so naturally I just switched to the snow shovel,) and finally gave up when I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I also realized that the concrete mass had to have weighed well over 300 lbs and there was no way that I was going to be able to get it out.

The Hubs came home to a muddy pit around a concrete safety hazard at the end of our driveway that he says “then HAD to be dealt with regardless of if he had the desire or time to deal with it.” We had to attach the mass to the car to pull it out…it was THAT big.  Sadly, I really thought I’d have surprised him with a job well done instead of a job horrifyingly botched. The point here however though is that I do not entirely avoid shovels.  

This past week while he was gone, the garbage disposal broke.

So I, being the wiser for the shovel incident, called a plumber instead of trying to replace it myself. The plumber told me it was going to be $375…I told him to go home. Ok…so not really. I told him to come back the next day so that I could then basically give him the remains of our tax return and to get a new disposal. Really though, he was a super nice guy, but it was more than I thought it’d be. So after I decided that $375 seemed like too much, I called our friend Rick.

When the Hubs has been gone before, Rick has been known to save the day.

 

<—This is Rick.  He might shoot me for introducing you all to the top of his head, and for making you think that it took 2 beers worth of time to do this job.  It didn’t.  It took 20 minutes, and one of those little bottles was mine….for moral support.

Rick is an an old friend of ours who lived with us for about a year (he will tell you it was 6 months…we agree…but it was 2 separate stints of 6 months each.) He is engineer who works for BMW, and I just assume that since he knows about cars, he may know about anything else mechanical. Surely if you can engineer a car, you can install a disposal, right?

He and the Hubs talked on the phone about what kind of disposal to get, I went and bought it, and then he installed it, for the hefty price of a McAlister’s Deli club sandwich.

I had to clean out underneath the sink so that Rick could get to the disposal. Who knows how long the broken disposal had been leaking…long enough to create mildew, but thankfully not long enough to warp the wood or to attrach roaches. It was nasty though. 

Needless to say, I did some serious “cleaning out” of the cleaning supply.

I have a feeling that I probably need to motivate that cleaning out to other hidden cabinets as well. Maybe next time the Hubs has to be gone, I’ll tackle that….with a shovel!