Another Tortoise and Hare Story

This Old Tortoise

I will readily admit that I am the Handyman Tortoise in a line of Home Improvement Hares. My father was a truly gifted craftsman, equally adept in plumbing, carpentry, electrical wiring, painting...you name it, Dad could do it. He made his living as a "tinner," someone who fashioned all sorts of things out of light gauge metal, things like duct work, boxes, cabinets, etc..

Along with being very knowledgeable, Dad was also a tireless worker. He was constantly building stuff around the house when he wasn't rebuilding the house itself. Mom and Dad had bought several "fixer-uppers" along the way, and Dad never hesitated in stripping a house down to the studs and starting over, and he was able to accomplish all sorts of major projects even while working full time.

My two brothers seemed to have inherited the bulk of Dad's skills and energies. Both of them have done wondrous things with their homes. My brother Ray added a deck to the back of one of his houses, and he did it in a weekend.

I have been extraordinarily productive since I retired...at least by my standards. Yet as I look over the list of things I've done in the past year, I know that Dad would have pounded out all those things in a week (two at the most) and probably changed the oil in the car as well.

Sand, the supportive wife that she is, has never complained about my lack of handyman productivity, and even as our current project (the kitchen remodel) stretches into its third week, she still exhibits the patience of a saint, and she still is genuinely delighted when we begin to see any progress whatsoever.

I think that God knew exactly the type of man that Sand needed to make her happy, and so despite my genetic predispositions, made me a tortoise amongst hares so as to be able to allow my wife to live a contented life.

God is good. I'm just saying.

Topsy-Turvy

There's nothing like a good old home improvement project along with a computer malfunction to set your world topsy-turvy. Sand and I embarked on a remodel of our kitchen about two weeks ago. It's something we've been talking about for years. It's not really a big project, except of course if you have no idea what you're doing. Then every step is a major learning process. The biggest part of the project was the relocation of the the island that held the sink and dishwasher. We wanted to move it one foot out and seven inches to the left. I know that doesn't sound like much, and in fact I was afraid that we would go through all the work and find out that it really didn't make a difference. None-the-less, Thursday a week ago, with the encouragement of one of our friends who worked construction for years and years, we began tearing apart the island and moving it to its new location leaving us with no kitchen sink.

Concurrently, as a still inexplicable result of World_IPv6_Day, our home computers were locked out of Yahoo, Bing and most Google functions. While we still had gmail, we could not blog, leave comments on other peoples blogs, do any searches or even pull up the Google homepage.

We were, in a word, disrupted. I am dealing less well with disruption as I get older. I can remember being young and having no set ways or no place that was mine, so life was where you found it. Those were the heady (and irresponsible) days when the first thing you did when you woke up was to remember where you were and who you were with.

I really don't have any desire to go back to those days. I like knowing where my toothbrush is, and I like knowing that the things I will do today are not likely to hurt me. It could be very easy to look at my life and judge that it is boring, but I would argue that is practiced, a skill set honed by careful choices; yet  an inordinate number of those choices seem to involve the availability of the kitchen sink and, increasingly, internet search engines.

We got the island moved to its new location (after much swearing and sweating) and were able to hook up the old sink while we wait for counter tops and new sink to arrive. The new space seems luxurious, better than imagined, and after a great deal of research, I was able to track down the internet problem -- had to switch to a different DNS. So now I can once again google "how to install new kitchen sink" and be prepared for the next step in the remodeling project.

Life is returning to normal.