Now Accepting Applications for Husband

Necessary skills:

Must have own home (you're not moving in w/ me, buster)

Must have own transportation (so you can rescue me when the occasion arises)

Must have own tool box and ability to use it.

Age, physicial attributes and ethnicity not an issue.

Hours:  Must be on-call 24 hrs. a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, including holidays (when the sink usually backs up)

Pay Scale:  General ability husband: one home cooked meal per week + one "poor baby" per year if/when you're sick.

Husband w/ speciality in electricity, plumbing, or carpentry: two home cook meals per week + 3 "poor babies".

Husband w/ speciality in all three above: Will discuss in private.

So what's wrong with this ad?  Absolutely nothing!  Not if you've been living in my shoes for the past year.  My husband Don and I had 34 wonderful years of sharing household duties: I cooked, cleaned, and paid the bills, he changed light bulbs, killed bugs, and did anything that required tools.  It worked well for us.  Since Don went to the Great Toolbox in the Sky, however, things have gone decidedly downhill.

At first I was able to rely upon the kindness of strangers: husbands of friends who would come over and fix things for me.  That kind of sympathy and generosity, however, only lasts about a month.  After that you're on your own.

  My daughter learned the hard way how to get her father's antique truck started when it decides to stop for apparently no reason: you open the hood, take off the dohicky, pour gasoline in the thingamabob, put the dohicky back on, and start the truck.  We did that for a year before someone told us about starter fluid.

We paid $200 to a guy to come do some things around the house: like fix the door to the laundry closet (that lasted one week), put the top on the gazebo (that lasted less than a week), put up a paper towel holder (it broke the next day), and install the oven vent (it's still up but we're very careful with it).

About three months ago we started having a new problem: the hall bathroom began to leak.  We noticed this when we discovered a lake in my bedroom, right inside the door.  Not knowing what to do with the lake, I decided to adabt.  I never go barefoot.  I always wear slippers around the house.  Trudging through the lake on a many-times-a-day basis, however, was ruining my slippers, so I got a second pair of slippers and designated one pair of hard sole shoes as lake shoes, and kept a pair of slippers on each side of my bedroom door.  I would change into the hard sole shoes to trudge the lake, then step into a dry pair of slippers.  It worked.  However, the water was leaking into both my closets, one of which housed boxes of my out-of-print, collector-type books.  Good news: My out-of-print, collector-type books are now worth a lot more.  Bad news: There are hardly any left that aren't waterlogged.

The leak stopped of its own accord.  Really.  Instead of dripping out of the tub and into my closets and creating a lake in my bedroom, the leak became a gush of hot (yes, I said HOT) water coming out of the faucet into the hall bathtub.  This clouded the mirror in that bathroom and made the toilet paper feel used.  It also ran up our electric/water bill to $500 for one month.  We called a plumber.  He said it would cost several thousand to fix it, but they'd gladly let us pay it out.  I laughed "ha, ha."  I called my insurance company to see what they would do about the water damage to my carpet and the things in my closet. They laughed "ha, ha."  It seems that at the time my husband got the insurance he neglected to get "water damage" insurance.  If Don had known that he needed to get extra insurance for water damage, knowing our history with water (the 18 inches of water in our house after the 100 year flood in Houston in 1976, the leaking bathtub in our house in Austin that made a valiant attempt to crash through the second floor to the breakfast room below, the downstairs toilet in the same house that erupted raw sewage all over the first floor, the leaking dishwasher, the leaking disposal, the leaking.... well, you get the picture), he would have done it in a heartbeat.   So, no insurance, no plumber.

But we adapted.  Our daily schedule is this:

7 a.m. Go into kitchen, get 3 step stepladder, take to laundry closet, go up steps and get on top of dryer, reach over dryer (trying not to touch the hotwater coil, although it is not really hot at the moment), turn hot water on.  Crawl back down off dryer.

Take showers (Evin and Susan), run dishwasher, wash any towels necessary in hot water.

Go back up stepladder, get on top of dryer, reach over dryer (being very careful now not to touch the hotwater coil as it is now very, very hot), turn hot water off.  Crawl back down off dryer.  Find burn cream.

8 p.m. Repeat turning on hot water.  Run bath for 3 y/o.  Turn water off before putting 3 y/o in tub as the gushing hot water coming into the tub of its own accord could damage 3 y/o.

So, any husband applicants should be proficient in plumbing.  And the light doesn't work in the shed, so you should also be proficient in electricity.  And we had to take the doors of the utility closet to get up and down to the hotwater heater, so a proficiency in carpentry would be nice.  And the engine blew on my Jeep Cherokee Sport, so car mechanics is an absolute must.  I'm looking forwrad to hearing from all of you.