I fix things. That’s kind of who I am. Not like Jack on ‘Lost’, who keeps trying to fix things and just makes them worse or postpones the reckoning. Jack is impulsive and only looks at what’s right in front of his nose. It was odd when Sawyer recently claimed to see the big picture. I never thought of him that way but he might have a point. Oh and as far as what’s right in front of his nose Jack was also blind enough to not see that both Kate and Juliet were right there for the taking lots of times. But he blew it. That’s kind of who he is. A big puppy dog that keeps coming back for more. He’s sincere though.

How did I get onto a Lost train of thought? Oh, fixing things. I don’t fix human things, I fix THING things. Projects, light fixtures, dead computers, old porches, leaking roofs, and tired landscapes. I also improve things, like putting pickups into acoustic guitars, painting rooms, adding internet connections. And I make things, like beer.  Except for a few disasters with plumbing, everything pretty much always works.  Really. My dad was a fixer and I learned a lot from him.  Making beer, however I learned with Bob.

So this is really frustrating. 20 inches of snow over the weekend was fun and beautiful. I didn’t do any shoveling on account of my shoulder. My back alley neighbor Chris saw the Explorer stuck in the driveway and came over to help me out. Not only that, he used his little mini-Bobcat to dig out a trail to the alley so we could drive out and go to the blizzard party Saturday night. (I bought him a couple of bottles of wine today.)  There were a few short power failures but other than that everything was fine. Until I was sitting in the great room Sunday afternoon and noticed something dripping. After an hour or so we had half a dozen buckets catching drips from the ceiling and they got worse as the evening went on.  We watched the Super Bowl to the accompaniment of what sounded to be the tail end of a summer thunderstorm.  This morning, I pulled all the sofa sections to the outer walls of the room, took up the rug, spread out a big plastic sheet, and put industrial sized buckets on the floor. We literally have gallons of water in each.

It’s coming from somewhere up there. That foot or so of remaining snow on the roof is turning to water and it’s taking some circuitous path down walls and across beams and it comes down along a 10 foot line in the middle of the room. I was foolishly out on the lower roof this morning shoveling snow to both get weight off it and get a clue as to the problem. No luck. I climbed to the nether reaches of the attic over air conditioning units, under wires, tiptoeing on the rafters to very front of the house but learned nothing there either. I bought a rubber mallet and struck (with my left hand) the underside of the roof to try to make the big dam of snow slide off. Some of it did, and took down the FIOS cable with it. It is lying in the snow now, but fortunately our tv, phone and internet service still works. I tried another few ideas and frankly I’m beat. I don’t know where the water is coming from, and even if I did the top of the roof is too high and too covered with snow to inspect. I can’t raise a ladder up that high with my bad shoulder and frankly it would be foolhardy even by my standards to try to go up even if I were fully healed.  And another 10-20 inches is coming in the next few days.

So, it’s a matter of survival. Stress, or relax. I choose life. The inside air is usually way too dry in the winter, so dry it hurts your sinuses. So now we have a natural humidifier. Many people buy fancy indoor waterfalls to make a calming noise. We have ours for free.   We’d been meaning to move the sofas and clean under them for awhile and now that’s  done. The rug had some stains from the last party so now it will be easier to take it out to be cleaned. I’m sure there are many more things to be thankful about related to having a few dozen gallons of water drip down from your ceiling every day. We will just have to discover these over the next week when the new snow adds its contribution to the water symphony. When it all finally melts, I’ll find the problem and get somebody to fix it. That’s what everyone else does. If parts of the ceiling need to be replaced we’ll replace them. People do that too.  Someday, with a little, luck, I’ll be old (not just temporarily disabled) and will have do to a very good job at being patient. It will be a survival skill.

I’ll focus my talents on things I can fix, like that light fixture in the laundry room. I did that tonight after dinner. It only took 30 minutes and now it works. I’m well on my way back to mental health.