Tea with T.

The Plumber.

The Quick & Hot under-sink water unit is leaking.  Who you gonna call?  Despite your first guess (shouted out in your best Ray Parker, Jr. voice), I called and carefully explained the situation to the nice man who answered the phone at the office of The Plumber.  The Plumber, whose name I’ve seen on billboards every day of my nearly two decades in this valley.  The Plumber, whose wife I’ve known since our kids were in elementary school together.  Water + Leak = The Plumber.  It was a logical line of thinking, or so I believed.

 

Silly me.

 

Before calling The Plumber, I unplugged the under-sink hot water unit, because despite not knowing anything about how-to-fix the leak under my sink, I happen to know that water and electricity are bad bedmates.  So, to avoid personal injury and possibly electrocuting The Plumber (whose wife, I know, happens to love him), I quickly pulled the plug, to save us both.

 

The Plumber, is an awfully busy guy.  So, he sends one of his many plumbing wizards out to do his bidding.  Mr. Wizard arrives, squats down in that position responsible for the crack of legend and scratches his… head (Cheeky you! You went elsewhere, didn’t you?).  Turns out, Mr. Wizard is mystified by my under-sink hot water unit and I try to convince him it’s not the zebra in the field of horses he believes it to be.

 

I point out that the hose attaching the unit to the water line has brought its own crack to the party and that I’d tried to purchase a replacement, but my local hardware store didn’t carry what was needed.  Mr. Wizard shakes his weary head and says he’ll look in his truck, but seriously doubts that he has any appropriate hosing.  Returning five minutes later, he indeed confirms that there is nothing to be found and he’s certain (despite my insistence) that there wouldn’t be any at the office either.  The hose now has the upper hand, defeating both hardware store and highly-paid plumbing professionals.  Mr. Wizard suggests that I get the hosing I need from the good people at Quick & Hot (which, if this were Las Vegas, makes this last sentence rotate on an entirely different axis).

 

In order to be helpful (and to earn his pay, I suppose) Mr. Wizard cuts the hose above the leak, repositions the entire unit up two inches (“…with drywall anchors!” he tells me) and announces he is finished.  He taps the top of the sink, stating that the unit also has a spot there that seems to be leaking.  I politely ask him to fix it.  He shakes his head and says, “Well, these things require special tools that I don’t have.”

 

“You’re a plumber.  Your business is to deal with pipes and hoses and water and leaks.  What possible tools do they not provide you with, to do your job?”

 

“An allen wrench.”

 

“Wha?... Listen, I’m a girl who doesn’t know nothin’ ‘bout tools, but I know that an allen wrench is not special.  Ikea hands those out all the live-long day for free and charges for their meatballs.  Not THAT unusual.”  [FYI, Mr. Wizard… calling it a Hex Key makes it considerably more remarkable and odd.   You might want to lead with that, next time.]

 

Mr. Wizard stares at the floor and sighs. “Sign here.”  He hands me a clipboard.  And no pen.  Apparently, there are many tools too special to trust professionals with.  I used my own.  Ironically, one that advertises one of our local electricians.

 

14 minutes: $140 dollars.  Ten bucks a minute.  You can’t blow through that in the most entertaining of arcades.  In fact, slot machines give more play per minute.  And I’m willing to bet if those folks at Quick & Hot were to put out a shingle in Nevada, they’d do a bang up business in a quarter of an hour, too.

 

In my next life, I’m going to fill out an application to either come back as a cat or a plumber.  Not just any plumber, either: The Plumber.  Using my pen.

 

50 is the new 50.

One month from today I will turn 50.  It’s funny, but when people hear that, they like to ask, “How do you feel about that?!” as though it’s a diagnosis, not a birthday.  Outside of a wee blood pressure issue that is certainly a sign of aging, I feel fine, thank you for asking.  But, honestly I’ve felt fine about all of the decade milestones.  20, 30, 40 they were all good.  10 was probably the worst one, but that had more to do with a creepy family “friend” (with friends like him, who needed felons) than it did with getting older.

 

Getting older is one of the greater privileges you get in this life.  Sure, there’s some crap that also comes on the tray, but if you really look at it – aging really is a gift.  You can start with the #1 platitude about the process: With age, comes wisdom.  While that is mostly true for a large portion of the population, there is that group that is repeatedly offered the bag o’ smarts and turns it down, judging by their complete inability to mature (or spell).  It’s as though they stopped accepting the inflow of any information containing more than 140 characters at a time between the ages of 16-22 and man, is it annoying.

Are you “mom” enough?

The media is a wicked mistress, especially when it comes to manufactured holidays like Mother’s Day.  Time magazine’s latest cover didn’t help matters much, either.

 

Mother’s Day ads are filled with images of mothers holding babies, toddlers delivering self-portraits, men carrying breakfast trays and elderly women being hugged by multiple generations.  Nice.  But not always the picture painted in homes hither and thither and yon.

 

The uproar over whether Time Magazine’s recent cover of a woman breastfeeding her combat fatigue wearing, half-her-size son, for me had less to do with whether it portrayed an inappropriate relationship with her child (?) and more to do with the fact that she was color-coordinated in clean, tight clothes and her hair was brushed (probably her teeth, too – that lucky woman) and she didn't look sleep-deprived.  Most women I know who breastfeed do not look highly polished and stylized doing so.  Motherhood is a deliciously messy business.  I don’t care how old the clinging kid is.  And their headline of "Are you mom enough?" -- well, them's just fightin' words to mothering individuals. Everywhere.

Autoneurotica

My car despises me.  There is no other way to explain how cruel it has been to me over the years.  Mainly, there’s the whole funhouse effect whenever I approach the driver’s side window, reflecting a face that can only be described as funeral parlor ready, wearing a fright wig styled by faulty electrical outlet and eggbeater.

 

Don’t judge me.  I spend a perfectly adequate amount of time getting ready in the morning: 45 minutes showered-to-powdered and out the door.  Seriously, that’s neither a high-maintenance nor She-Doesn’t-Care-Anymore kind of timeframe (which you WILL recognize when my black hat and sunglasses come out to play).  There are days I leave for a business meeting or Date Night feeling pretty darn good about myself, only to have the car take me down.  One glimpse and I’m suddenly all blubbery, sputtering with leaky eyes.  All because I hear my car’s voice asking, “How could you possibly go out looking like THAT?!” [And you should know that she sounds like a judgmental cross between Joan Rivers and James Lipton.] 

The one that got away.

Everyone has a fish story.  The exaggerated tale of the “catch-of-a-lifetime” that was nearly theirs.  It could have been a job or career that they’d dreamed of and never got.  Maybe it was the education or an experience that eluded them due to financial strains.  Sometimes it is an opportunity that was close enough to touch, but didn’t transpire.  For many, it is unrequited love that wriggled from their grasp, leaving them with an eternal case of regret, from which, they will never recover.

For years, I’ve watched my friends, and myself, replay and agonize over the ones (oh, there’s always more than one) that “got away.”  Sitting over pots of tea or glasses of wine, the stories pour out, each of us trying to figure out what went wrong or what might have been the one thing to change to change the outcome.