the handyman can cuz he mixes it with love

Oh, dear readers. The following story will reveal gobs about the exciting weekend entertainment of yours truly and her beau, and it will have you shaking your heads in wonderment at my callous underestimation of my honey's handyman skills. Mayhaps he should be joining the Handyman Club of America after all.

If there's one thing he ain't, S. is not very perceptive when it comes to recognizing when the floors need to be vacuumed. He lives with three dogs, remember. And in his defense, he has been sick with a nasty cold most of the week, so he gets a little bit of leeway there. But last night I couldn't take it anymore. I had to vacuum his place if I was going to be able to relax (Hi, I have issues). He's got one of those ultra-cool vacuum cleaners that doesn't take bags, but instead has a big clear tube so you can see all the shit you're sucking up. I like that. S.'s job is to empty that tube once I've filled it up. Division of labor, as it were.

I'm vacuuming the living room, the dining room, the hallway. I switch outlets and move into the bedroom. And as I'm vacuuming the bedroom, the vacuum just stops on me. The plug hasn't come out of the wall. It's just stopped.

"Honey! The vacuum died!"

Here comes the handyman to the rescue.

Oh. My. God. Watching him "fix" this vacuum was painful, my friends. Painful. He takes out his little 14-part tool/knife from his pocket and proceeds to unscrew a phillips head screw with a flat-edged part of that tool. When I can no longer take the excruciatingly slow progress he's making, I offer to get him a phillips head. He succeeds in unscrewing this screw THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY PART THAT MIGHT BE BROKEN. Huh, he says, and screws it back in. He then turns to the back of the vacuum and unscrews--are you ready for this--the piece that holds the attachments on.

Me: That holds the attachments on. What's that got to do with it not working?

He: Doesn't matter. Real handymen just take things apart.

He continues to unscrew non-mechanical parts until he's down to just the bottom part, you know, the part that actually picks shit up. He flips that part over, pushes some things around, and says, with an air of dignified certainty, "My diagnosis is.....it's broken."

I leave the room while he works on putting the thing back together, certain that there's no way on god's green earth that he's actually done anything. In fact, that's what I keep saying, "You didn't even DO anything."

A few minutes later I'm in the living room and he calls to me to say it's back together.

Me: But you didn't even DO anything.

He: But if it works, you can never make fun of me again.

Friends, it turned on. He removed the attachments and the damn thing turned on. He is a handyman.

He: You have to blog about this! And you have to say how much you were making fun of me.

Indeed, I was making fun. I was having fun making fun. This is what we do on a Friday night, and we're not even that old. We take the vacuum cleaner apart, put it back together, and we're suddenly so much closer for it. Ah, love.