Bad Girl
Mr. Fixit
Sunday, May 26, 2013
(SNN) - Back in the sixties, when young boys were fascinated with Superman, Star Trek and The Green Lantern, something went slightly amiss in my guy’s childhood. He fixated on the wrong fantasy.
My husband’s hero surely must have been television’s “Mr. Fixit.” This is the only way to explain the litter of tools and half-finished projects around this house.
Remember those shows? Mr Fixit would decide to renovate an entire three piece bath in an afternoon. He would stand erect, flexing his manly chest, carrying his manly tools, and say something like, “Well, Jim; all we need for this job is a little tile glue, available at any local hardware store. Shouldn’t be too difficult. Finish it by supper.”
Thirty years later, Mr. Fixit (or a reasonable facsimile) has been reincarnated in the guise of my husband. Every weekend, my guy can be seen tramping merrily back and forth between the basement and garage, hammer in hand, looking for ‘projects.’ In this, he excels. He is the Grand Master of home renovation plans. Even I admit, his plans are generally to-notch. Unfortunately, hardly any of them get finished.
I blame this on ‘the lure of the virgin project.’ I remember the day I came home on a Sunday, to discover my husband standing before a six-foot hole in the family room wall. This looked suspiciously like a hole that might potentially be a door into the garage, someday. In fact, the garage was now quite visible from the family room, and could even be considered part of the same living area. Certainly the neighbouring field mice thought so.
Now I admit an interior entrance into the garage is an extremely useful feature. But on a Sunday night, in the middle of winter, it is somewhat difficult to buy a door. And when your guy is leaving almost immediately for a two week business trip, the odds of filling a hole with a door before Jack Frost makes it through are about as high as the odds of finding an honest mayor in Toronto.
Which is to say, we got out the parkas. So did the mice.
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