(Originally published 11/19/2009)

Given that we have now been living in our house for over ten years, my husband and I are no strangers to the world of home repairs. As a matter of fact, I have just now had to flee my house as the roofers have been at work since 7 AM, pounding their Shingles Of Death directly into my nervous system. And in order to make my escape I had to use my husband’s and my “emergency code” to inform him that, not only had the roofers parked their van directly behind my spot in the garage, they had also begun using it as a temporary dump for all their stuff, stuff that apparently was being thrown away in the imaginary dumpster located right next to the real-life dumpster, which, incidentally, was blocking the other side of our garage.) And so, I COULD NOT GET OUT.

And lo, there was a giant meltdown in the land. Because, if you know anything about fibromyalgia, one of its possible causes-as well as one of its most debilitating symptom-is a sensory processing disorder. As in, your system is unable to process all the sensory stimulation it receives. As in, there are times when the experience of air touching your skin can be the most excruciating thing you’ve ever experienced. As in, if you are ever looking for a way to torture and/or murder one of us, sending a crew to pound on our roof All. Day. Long. is definitely the way to go.

Oh, and by the way: if you also instruct your Latin American roof crew to just gaze at us and respond, “Huh?”, with blank, uncomprehending stares when we ask them, IN FLAWLESS SPANISH, if they could please move their truck out of our driveway, so that we can PLEASE, PLEASE GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE!!,  forcing us to have to revert to Stupid American Loud Talking And Giant, Idiotic Gestures, that will pretty much be the final nail in our coffin.

However: despite everything, this is actually the best home repair experience we’ve had since we’ve lived here. Everyone showed up when they said they would, did everything they said they would do, in the time they said it would take them to do it, and now, with the exception of the dumpster which has yet to be picked up and carried away, you can’t even tell that anyone was even working on our house two days ago.

Unfortunately, that has not always been our the case for us.

The first time we had to deal with something like this occurred about six months after we first moved into the house, when an ice storm threw a giant hunk of tree directly through our bedroom roof.

Now the important thing to know here is that our house is the second one in as you turn off of a pretty well-traveled road. So we and our tarp were completely visible to everyone driving by. Which meant that we received offers from every single roofing company in the city, most of which were formed as the “owners” drove up to our house, and all of which could be summed up as, “Two Men And A Truck. And Sometimes, A Ladder.”

And then a few years later there was Dave. Dave showed up at our door one day and delivered a very intense lecture detailing our urgent and immediate need to hire him to pressure wash our driveway and deck, and also allow him to “hot chemical” our roof.

Now normally we would not have hired someone off the street but, 1) we did need some work done, and 2) Dave had the most wonderful voice of any human being who has ever existed on this planet. It’s very similar to that of Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs”, and I would have stood there in my dirty driveway and listened to him speak nonsense for hours, it was that compelling.

Unfortunately, his voice would turn out to be my downfall. Because it would continue to speak of the wonders that Dave could perform on our humble home. And so I would tell my husband, and then he would agree to the work, and then I would give Dave a check, and then there would be no sign of Dave for up to two weeks at a time, when he would then once again appear-after having done no work-and ask for yet another check.

I kept trying to explain this situation to my husband who was unclear as to why I was so increasingly angry, and who kept  telling me that everything was okay, and that I really needed to calm down. Then one evening he picked up the checkbook, rifled through the pages, and asked, “Hey-where is all this money going?”

“THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU!!!”, I shrieked, as the skin began to melt off of my face. (I’m definitely the person you want to have around you in a crisis, as calm, cool, and collected is clearly my middle name.) Only I don’t think he actually heard me, because I’m pretty sure I was operating on a frequency that even dogs could not pick up.

As it turned out, Dave was in the middle of a pretty big life crisis, one that caused him to take our checks directly to the music store in order to buy the very latest in amps and electric guitars, which in and of themselves are just fine, but are really not all that useful when it comes to re-painting someone’s house.

Luckily for us Dave’s partner is really honest, and acts with tremendous integrity. He was also a little miffed at Dave, as he too was unable to use Dave’s electronics when it came to things like, oh, buying some paint, and maybe paying his mortgage. So he managed to get ahold of Dave and salvage some of the money, and then came and completed the job himself. For which we will be eternally grateful.

And then there was The Week Of Hank, a week during which I unfortunately had contracted both bronchitis and a sinus infection. Now as you all know, normally I would have spent a week like that lying prostrate on the living room floor and weeping. But this time I couldn’t, because I had to supervise Hank.

So as occasionally happens when you’re a homeowner, last week we had a representative of a local business show up on our porch and do his best to convince us to give him some of our money for, I’m not kidding, “a problem that you probably haven’t noticed yet.” I said no, which of course he ignored, and he continued to prattle on about his company’s wonderful extermination service and how they were giving it away “for dirt cheap” the following day.

Happily I’ve gotten old enough and confident enough that I can say no without feeling like I have to justify myself, although I did have a number of reasons. I could have told him that I don’t hire companies that have to go door to door to drum up business, which is true. I could have said that I don’t give money to people who come to my door because I’ve been scammed before, which is also true. But the true reason I don’t hire door-to-door salesmen lies a decade in the past with a man named Dave.

Coming Up For Air

(originally published 6/4/2007)

I know I haven’t had a lot to say here lately, and that is due to the fact that I have been deep in the bowels of Being A Homeowner.

It all started so innocently back at the beginning of May when my husband uttered those four little words: “We’ve got wood rot.”

So that meant that I performed all my tutoring sessions for the rest of that month to the mellifluous background soundtrack melody of huge pieces of wood being ripped off the side of the house.

Because you know that the repairs did not stop with just the affected section. Oh no. Because that section was right next to the porch, a porch that of course became sadly shabby and run-down looking when compared to the brand spankin’, freshly painted new side of the house. So naturally we had to rip out the entire porch railing and prepare to “redo the deck”, a portentous sounding project if I ever heard one.

Apparently I then spent a lot of time beseeching the universe for Ways I Can Get Out Of Having To Do This Please!, because one day when I came home from working out, there, in my driveway, was Dave.

Dave has a wonderful voice, a voice very much like that of Mike Rowe, former opera singer and current host of the TV show “Dirty Jobs” on the Discovery Channel. I really didn’t care what Dave had to say, as long as he just kept on saying it. But then I began listening to his words.

“Behold,” said Dave, “your concrete is all black and dirty, like unto the dark heart of the blackest night. But I wilt come and wash it with my special “hot chemical”, and lo, it will shine like the clearest diamond and sparkle like the brightest sun.”

“Hm,” I replied.

“And verily,” continued Dave, “we also do decks.”

So we hired Dave to come and work on our house. And Dave pressure washed the house, the deck, the driveway, and all our walkways. And it was very good.

But it was also dangerous, because that was the moment that we all began Getting Ideas.

“You know,” I said to my husband, “wouldn’t it be a great idea to have your family and my family down for Memorial Day?”

“You know,” said Dave, “now that the house is clean, this is the perfect time to re-paint it.”

And so his idea and my idea met, collided, and then took on a whole life of their own.

Now that we are getting the entire house re-painted,

-Of course we have to rebuild the entire deck railing from scratch

-and re-landscape the entire front lawn

-and construct a special container on the side lawn to hold the enormous pile of gravel that’s been sitting on our driveway for an entire year (don’t ask)

-And sure, I can also prepare all of my students for their final exams in Spanish

-And host some out-of-town guests

-And easily conclude the final “tapering off” of the anti-depressant I’ve been taking for the past 14 years a mere week before we host our first ever joint family holiday gathering

Not surprisingly, my body responded to all of my insane delusions by sticking out its tongue, making a funny face, and contracting strep throat (which in turn meant receiving various helpful, yet painful, shots in the ass.)

If you listen very closely, you can still hear the quiet ticking of the Crazy Time Bomb Of Doom that I had become. Clearly, a meltdown was imminent.

The final straw occurred on the Thursday before the party when I tried, and failed, to plant three gardenia bushes in our front yard. It should give you some indication of just how completely at-the-end-of-my-ability-to-function-in-everyday-life I was that I was incapable of digging three holes in the ground, filling them with plants that had already been grown, and covering them back up with dirt.

Fortunately my husband arrived home not long after that and took over, although my hysterical wailing at first convinced him that I’d somehow accidentally lopped off one of my arms with the garden shears.

So he took over the planting, and I decided to do a few more weeks of tapering the meds, and the world slowly began to right itself once more.

Which was a very good thing, because the next day when he showed up to work on the house Dave motioned for me to come outside to where he was standing.

“Hi,” said Dave. “I think you have termites.”

Happily we don’t, and the party went well, and Dave has just about run out of Finding Things To Fix. I think.