Tidy Husband

Eligible for the seniors discount and the Happy Meal deal at the same time.

  1. Letting it Sink in

    A story about learning the trades.

    I don’t know why I thought I could bang out a quick faucet repair in about a half an hour but here was my delusional self under our bathroom vanity sink with a shopping list of problems staring back at me:

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    Photo by Chastity Cortijo on Unsplash

    1. Cold water handle is tight.
    2. The handle is tight so when you pull on it - the entire faucet assembly moves.
    3. While turning off water to try and fix the above two I noticed that there’s a leak.

    Oh. Good.

    The first business at hand was to try and get that leak to stop and with a bit of frantic searching at YouTube University I found a solution that should work before the water got ankle deep, and thankfully it did.

    I’m on a roll now. “I’ve got this”, I say to myself.

    I don’t “have” this, or anything at all - as now the entire vanity has been unscrewed from the wall and I’ve got pipes off and hoo boy - it’s not good. not good.

    Also, wet.

    But at least I stopped the leak, so progress.

    Up next: why the heck is the cold handle so hard to turn? Again I attend my favorite school and learn that if you take a hex wrench and unscrew the little bolt at the back of the faucet then you can remove the handle and clean or replace as needed.

    The little hex screw was stripped. There’s about 2 inches from the back of the faucet to the wall so there’s not a lot of room to work back there. The internet told me to use an elastic band. Spoiler: the elastic band did not work

    The internet also told me to drill it out or use some voodoo like baking soda and superglue but I could envision myself covered in baking soda and superglued to the vanity so I decided against that option.

    The thing that worked was to hammer in a torx screwdriver and turn and lo and behold the screw came right out.

    But this led to more disappointment as the internet told me that I could take the entire handle apart and clean it as the reason it wasn’t working was probably just mineral buildup and a good disassemble and clean would have us good as new.

    Trouble is, we bought the the model with no hope of disassembly and so I did the next big thing and sprayed a few dollars of WD-40 in every crevice I could find and then turned and turned and turned and finally things loosened up enough so I could put it back again and tighten that set screw.

    The last problem was the entire faucet assembly was loose and so it would actually move if you went to turn on or off the water. Not good. If I had to guess, the tiny little hands of destruction were to blame because this vanity has been fine until she showed up and is now washing and brushing on her own.

    Once again - a thing that should be easy is not. I had ideas of quickly reaching under the sink and tightening a nut and ta-da!. There was no ta-da, because the design of the sink makes it close to impossible to get your hand anywhere near that little plastic nut.

    But after some swearing and arm contorations, I managed to get this thing tight against the furnace

    All that was needed was to get the pipes and drains connected and that was the easy part and everything buttoned back together without problem.

    As I write this, we have a clean and working sink that cost us nothing for the repair other than my efforts. I have no idea if this repair will last longer than the time it took for you to read this, but if it doesn’t I have a backup plan:

    I’ll get out the baking soda and superglue.

    Learning the trades one day at a time,

    TH and Co.

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  2. Let it Snow

    A story about Snow. And Ponies.

    As always here, the plan for the day and the events of the day are two completely different things.

    The plan was BW was to take the child mid morning to her swimming lessons while I drove strangers around for a bit and then we would get back together for a later lunch with the result of the child being a better swimmer and I would have made a few bucks.

    This did not happen.

    BW was unwell all day, so that means that it was the Dad and Child show for the good part of the day.

    First, because we did it yesterday - she wanted to have a box lunch for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I went with it for breakfast and lunch because - whatever, but at dinner time I told her she had to eat off a plate like a real person.

    Then all morning, she wanted to do one thing: make snow 1

    But first, swimming:

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    I am happy to report that there’s some progress being made in the swimming department and I should hope so as we’ve been sending her for a few years now I think. She is now starting to swim instead of just sinking.

    After swimming and lunch and a bit of relaxing on Dad’s part it was time for us to make the snow!

    I have to tell you I was not sure how would this work out - other than very messy.

    The ingredients were: Hand lotion and baking soda.

    It ended up being about a 3:1 ratio of soda to lotion and worked on our first try. Of course she wanted to play with me so I was given two ponies to compliment her two and we pranced around in the snow I had placed on a cutting board on a kitchen table.

    The “snow” wasn’t too, too messy and I might make it again when we’re bored again.

    She played with it for about 20 minutes then walked away leaving me to cleanup. Don’t let the looks of this stuff fool ya - one of two ingredients were lotion and that stuff took some to clean off and I ended up giving four little ponies a bath in the kitchen sink.

    It’s been busy and non stop here. I have played school today with recess and lunch and I even had to do a presentation on why healthy foods are better for you - she’s one tough teacher.

    I had just got her to bed when she heard the TV go on so BW could watch Sunday Night Football. Of course, the child heard the ruckus and came down to me in the kitchen to see what was up.

    I told her that mommy was watching TV and if you wanted to cuddle up with her on on the couch, she could. 2

    I wish I could have recorded the look on her face when she heard “yes”, instead of no. She wasted no time in getting under the blankets with mommy and the two snuggled and armchair quarterbacked together for a good half hour before she basically begged to go to bed.

    I haven’t heard a peep since.

    Oh, There’s just 39 days until Christmas, in case you were wondering.

    She better not pout,

    TH and Co.

    1. this will make sense in a bit - keep reading. ↩

    2. I will probably pay for this in the morning. ↩

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  3. King for a Day

    with a bit of help from my princess.

    BW was away all day at a conference so that meant it was just the child and I at home alone without adult supervision.

    What’s the worst that could happen?

    McDonalds? Nope
    Candy Store? Nope
    Go Carting? Nope, never again.

    The requirements were that we could not leave the house and eat and entertain ourselves without going outside.

    That left us with….

    Baking? YES!! Baking.

    You read that right - baking. This was the plan all week as she saw a recipe in this month’s highlights magazine that she gets delivered and the recipe was for cranberry orange cake, and I made the mistake of suggesting making it this weekend.

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    Baking is tricky, because there’s some science at work here so you can’t just wing it like you would with say a stir-fry where you can toss some random veggies and rice in a pot and you’ve got dinner.

    Baking is hard, but we had a plan: I was in charge of measuring and she was in charge of pouring.

    And it worked out well, this measuring and pouring team of ours:

    before…

    after

    the proud baking princess.

    One would thinkg that after all that baking I would be let off for good behaviour, but she had other plans. She was to dress up in her princess dress and I was to dress up as a king and then we were to have a royal tea party.

    This king dressing is hard because I really did not want to dress up just to eat cake,so we compromised: I wore a tie over my sweatshirt and she made me a paper crown to put on my head and that seemed to work well enough for her so I was good.

    All we needed now was some cake and some tea and we had our very own royal tea party.

    I guess you could say that today was a piece of cake!:)

    Going for seconds,

    TH and Co.

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  4. The Thinnest and Lightest Apple Laptop Yet

    The MacBook air is so 2024.

    It’s fall and that’s when all the tech gets released just in time for the holiday buying season and I don’t know how this happened but I found a prototype of the newest Apple computer that is so thin and light you guys - you will not believe it when you see it.

    Introducing the Apple PaperBook. So thin and so light you will think it’s paper, and that’s because it is!

    Microchips and aluminum or titanium of the previous models were still too heavy to carry around all the time but this this, this is the lightest and and thinnest Apple has ever made and sets a new record that their Windows competition can’t beat.

    The first thing you will note is the unboxing experience: there is no box. You don’t need one with the Apple PaperBook because the box would weigh more than the device and that would be silly. You can take the paperbook with you everywhere or fold it up into oragami to entertain your friends at Starbucks.

    After years of having the same apple logo for well over 20 plus years now, it was time for a change and now we’ve introduced the stem. From this day on if you see an apple computer without the new stem logo then you’ll know you’re looking at the older discontinued models that actually do something related to computing.

    But it’s not all about looks with the new PaperBook.

    This is a fully functional device for the power user in all of us. Now featuring facebook mode where the only thing on the screen ever displayed - is facebook. Here at Apple we did a lot of research and when we asked our customers what they wanted, they told us they only visit facebook with their $2000 laptops anyway and this is why we can make the PaperBook so thin and light as it only has one function:

    To look at your friends and their cats.

    Upon opening the PaperBook,the first thing you see is the nonstandard keyboard. In an effort to streamline design even further we remove all the keys you need, but kept some keys you don’t need - just to make things confusing for our users.

    The new custom designed keyboard is designed to type in FACE and the computer will do the rest on autofill and reload facebook for you so you can get all caught up to date on your friends and their food and cat pictures. Lastly, The display has our new NOGLASS Technology becuase, well, it’s a piece of paper with a drawing of a stick man - but this new technology is now unbreakable thanks to the new design. 1

    This is the new PaperBook.

    Available in stores this coming Tuesday and online.

    See you on facebook,

    TH and Co.

    1. just keep the display away from children with scissors, as your applecare warranty does not cover this type of damage. ↩

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  5. Winning Twice

    A story about winning for a cause

    I’m so proud of the child today.

    Not only did we make the bus this morning with seconds to spare she also was a raffle winner today.

    this is what almost missing the bus looks like.

    Last Saturday she ran in her school’s turkey trot an entire quarter mile around the track at the high school in an effort to aquire donations for those in need. BW raided the pantry and closets the night before looking for stuff we could donate and she found a whole lot of stuff other than cans of tuna.

    The day of the run comes and the child runs:

    2nd from last is still a winner.

    She came in 2nd to last. Both BW and I apologize now for the non-athletic genes.

    On the way out they had a raffle where you put the tickets in the envelope by the item you’re interested and although this would not be my choice - it was hers and she came home with her winning item:

    I think she might be a little young for this, so I will let it sit for a few more days until it’s forgotten about and then I’ll hide it in plain sight on the bookshelf because nobody looks for books there - the ones that get read around here are in the bedroom somewhere - probably on the floor somewhere.

    I didn’t think we were the age of K-Pop but then what do I know?

    Regardless, good job! - as we say around here.

    Keep Popping o K-Popping, or….reading?

    TH and Co.

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