Now That's Handy!

Greetings! I write to you this evening from my dining room where my precious laptop is housed. Now my laptop, well, it’s not in top-notch shape. It functions just fine, but it’s no beauty. If it were a car you’d say it was reliable, if it were a house you’d call it a fixer-upper, if it were a high school girl, you’d say it had a nice personality. Over a year ago Mike had it in the airplane in his backpack and a water bottle leaked on it. It filled the screen up and a project was born. In a time when maybe your husband or wife would have thrown in the towel and bought a new laptop, my husband purchased a fix-it kit and spent hours taking layer upon layer of screen off of it,(there are several layers in your laptop my friends) repaired it, and it was as good as new. Like a good plastic surgeon Mike managed to keep it looking good and working well. But what this plastic surgeon failed to mention to his graceless wife was that the laptop was a bit more fragile than it used to be.

I may be small, but you can hear me coming a mile away. The pounding of my feet, the accidental crashing of the door, the muffled cry as I once again stub my toe, catch my fingernail, step on a lego, trip on a shoelace, kick myself in the shin, you get the picture. Anyway, precision and grace aren’t my strongest suits, and when I am done with my computer for the night, the top gets slammed down and I’m off. Long story short, the top of this already fragile entity, was slammed one time too many and now I am the only girl on the planet who has a laptop held together on one side with two sets of nuts and bolts. Sometimes, even with the bolts in place, part of the screen will still pop out and I will push it in and go on with my day.

Being married to someone handy is amazing. If something breaks I guarantee you my husband can fix it. I always say if you can’t marry for money then for goodness sake, marry handy. Oh yes, and marrying for love might help, too. Lucky for me, I love my handyman. Whenever we see something cool at a store, Mike says, “Let’s not spend the money, I can make that.” And the truth is he can, now does he, well that's a blog for another time. To make matters even better for a scatterbrain like myself, my husband is also very, umm, frugal. This is great for a girl who is a little more lax with the spending…Mike keeps me from making dumb purchases and shady investments. He might say things like Do you really need those shoes or do you really want to invest all our money on a beach resort in Antarctica? So if marrying frugal is good and marrying handy is good, and marrying for love is the ultimate, then for goodness sake marrying someone handy and frugal who you love must be like winning a gold medal in life, right? Well, for the most part yes, but, you might want to re-read paragraph two here, and realize that I have a laptop that is BOLTED together! Rather than give up and dig up the funds to get a new computer my husband bolted the thing together and called it a day.

When our dog chewed through her leash for the 50th time, instead of spending $25 on a heavy duty chain Mike bought a bunch of rope and a clasp from Home Depot for a few bucks and made his own version of a chew-proof leash. When Madison complained that she was getting grease on her pant leg from the chain of her bike, Mike cut a piece of Velcro, fastened it to her sweat pants and they held tight, never to flap into the path of her chain again. Car sliding on ice? Mike will throw an engine block in the back for some added weight and you’re good to go. Pets eating from each others' bowls? Mike can rig something to fix that. Cables out? Car’s broken? Phone’s fallen into Lake Union? Fixed, fixed, fixed.

Don’t misunderstand it’s not all duct tape and Jeff Foxworthy here at the Allen house. Mike can be quite a craftsman, too. We have a beautiful fireplace in our bedroom, an awesome fire pit in our backyard, a huge hand-built shed on the back of our house and a beautiful dining room table that he refinished, and that’s just to name a few.

Even though it’s just a hobby and I will likely never be a real author; my blog gives me a little boost of adrenaline and the chance to be a writer. Mike knows this and supports me 100%. I like to have something posted at least every two weeks. When two weeks have gone by and I haven’t posted something, I start to worry about this self-imposed deadline. I sit down to write, whether I have a subject matter or not. I can really get caught up in wanting to make my blog just right and Mike knows that as well. This evening I was working on a blog about my less than savvy technological skills, but I just couldn’t make it work. Mike came into the kitchen and suggested I go for a kayak ride alone and just think for a bit. While I was out there, I realized I’d have to table the tech blog for another time. It just wasn’t in me.
Discouraged, I paddled to shore, tied the kayak up to a rusty crowbar that Mike has inserted into the ground as a temporary mooring and came into the house, being careful not to be hit by the wooden doorstop Mike invented to keep the dog from pawing open our sliding glass door. I sat down and started typing this blog. It might not be what I set out to achieve, and it might not be pretty, flowery and full of beautiful language, but it works. Looks like Mr. Fix It has done it again.