Dare To Repair (Or Maybe Just Call Someone)

So I woke up last Thursday morning and found Larry messing around in the laundry room where the magic Verizon box is and swearing quietly to himself. NO INTERNET. Thus started a 4-hour ordeal of his being on the phone with Verizon, trying to troubleshoot the problem, before they agreed to send someone to our house later that day.

These wifi thingies were all glowing an apocalyptic red Thursday morning

In the meantime, the rest of us wandered around the house, bereft and confused, but still too cheap to run up the data charges on our phones. Guys, it turns out we use the internet A LOT. ALL THE TIME. CONSTANTLY.

So, after we endured 4 more hours of living as though it were 1999, the repair guy came to the door and was treated as the conquering hero that he was. We all had to wear masks while he was in the house, which believe me, was no problem. Heck, we would have held our breaths if we had to. JUST GIVE US OUR INTERNET.

Which he did. Whereupon we all heaved a sigh of relief, put away our checkers and our whittling knives, and resumed a happily internet-dependent, 21st-century existence.

But somewhere in the middle of that - I guess while Larry was on the phone with the Verizon help line -- I heard him saying, "I have to set up a new PIN?" and I thought, Oh, no, not that.  You see, Larry -- security conscious as he is -- usually chooses passwords and PINS that no one (i.e., moi) can ever remember. 

And yes, we do try to write them all down, but we can never find the darn list when we need it. Look, I never said we were the most organized couple in the world, all right?

Anyway, Larry came up the stairs shortly thereafter to where I was busy sitting on the couch, missing my internet, and said, "Our new Verizon PIN is ****" (those are numbers, I'm just not telling them to you,because well, duh). Ever the optimist, I tried to make some sense of the 4 digits he chose, but I couldn't. Important date? Someone's phone number? Our old license plate number from the first state we lived in, which happens to be the only plate number stuck in my memory? No, none of that.

Me: How the heck am I supposed to remember 4 random numbers like that?

Larry:

Me: Well?

Larry: It's the date we met.

And that's how I lost a whole bunch of marriage points in one fell swoop. (Although, as a friend later pointed out, I'm still way ahead because of all the points I won from the bagel-slicer incident.) AND I had to watch Larry act insufferably smug for the rest of the day. 

But I did have my internet, so I couldn't complain. Much.

In other news, I became seriously delusional at some point last week and decided that, in true Rosie the Riveter fashion, I was perfectly capable of stripping the old caulk from our kitchen sink and replacing it with new caulk. So I went to Home Depot and bought some tools and implements of destruction, waited until Larry went to bed (I was trying to surprise him, in a good way), and commenced my operation.

These are much harder to use than they look

People, it took me almost an hour to dig out all the pieces of rotting, moldy caulk, even with that handy-dandy tool pictured up there. But once I did, I thought, Hey! Now I just squeeze this stuff out of the tube, smooth it, and let it dry. Easy!

[Narrator: It wasn't easy]

In one corner, I managed to get that nice, smooth professional look of freshly applied caulk. The rest? Well, it looked like a 5-year-old had done it. And the more I tried to fix it, the worse it got. It reminded me of the time my parents left me with a sitter and I got Silly Putty stuck all over the bathroom faucet and I finally gave up trying to remove it and went to bed. It was all gone in the morning, and no one ever mentioned it, much to my relief.

So, hoping for a similar miracle, I taped off the sink and went to bed.

Back right-hand corner looks good, right? RIGHT?

Unfortunately, it still looked pathetic in the morning, but Susie had helped a little by leaving a note for Larry: "Mommy worked really hard on this, so say it looks good."

Larry said it looked good. But he was shaking his head a lot all morning.

The Ties That Bind

 Today? I cleaned out the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen. It had been bugging me for months, what with it jamming on the doohickey that spreads out crepes and the oversize pizza cutter my kids insisted on buying, so I tackled it. I did a darn good job, if I do say so myself:

I will absolutely need ALL of those rubber bands some day

But while I was cleaning it out, I found a zillion (more or less) twisty ties and plastic thing-a-ma-bobs that are used to close bread bags. I was throwing them away as I scooped them out, but it suddenly occurred to me to wonder where they came from. I mean, I have never made a point of saving one of these things myself. As you can see in the picture, we have those handy-dandy bag clips from IKEA that we use for everything that needs sealing. Yet, those twisty ties had been sitting in my drawer, unnoticed by me, because I (like everyone else my age, most likely) grew up in a house that had a drawer holding twisty ties. 

Maybe, in the back of my mind, I believed they were a naturally occurring phenomenon in kitchen drawers?

Later, all 4 of the at-home "kids" happened to be in the kitchen at once, eating breakfast or lunch or something in between, because really, who knows anymore what meal they are eating, as time has no meaning in this age of corona. I seized the moment to get to the bottom of this mystery: "Hey," I asked. "Which one of you is saving these twisty ties from the bread bags?"

They all denied having done any such thing, which means - stay with me here - Larry is the culprit. What's more, if he is the one doing it, that means he has been saving them for the past 30 years of our lives together and I NEVER NOTICED.

What's up with that?

"Why do you think Dad's saving them?" I asked the not-kids-anymore human beings at my table. To which question they responded - literally - as one: "Because that's what old people DO."

Okaaay...so that's another theory: Larry hasn't been saving these things for 30 years, it's just a habit that naturally developed once he hit age 50 or so. It's like your knees starting to get stiff or suddenly having eyebrows that attempt to grow all over your face. Suddenly, you find yourself tossing bread ties in the junk drawer like the self-respecting almost-senior citizen that you are.

This idea is disturbing. Also, just as FYI for my kids, we're not THAT old. Not saving-bread-ties old. I'm not, anyway. 

The rubber bands don't count, dammit.