Queen of Unhandy

I have been the Queen of Unhandy most of my life. It isn’t that I don’t want to be a good handyman (woman, person, whatever), I just never seem to manage to finish a project without having some problem arise during the project, and most of those problems seem to cause me personal embarrassment.

In the 70’s we moved into a new house my dad built. We had a young good looking painter working for us and I decided I wanted to get his attention by impressing him. I was going to do this by painting a small slatted table with metal tube legs to match my bedroom. It gave me a chance to be in the same room with the painter and show how we had something in common. I finished the bottom and was flipping the table over to do the bottom as I was glancing over to see if the Adonis painter had noticed what a terrific job I had done when SLAP. I had flipped the table too hard and it slapped across my face. This incident might not have been too bad if it had been the unpainted side that had hit my face, but no it was the painted side. I had black slats going across my face from my mouth up to my forehead. Of course, the painter found the whole thing hilarious, and said that things like that happened sometimes when children tried out new projects. I couldn’t decide whether to be upset because I had black stripes on my face or because he had called me a child, after all I was almost 14 years old!!!

Move forward from the 70’s to the early 80’s when I decided to refinish the dressers Raymond’s parents had handed down to us when we got married. I was doing the work in the garage, and Raymond, as per our agreement, was leaving me alone to do the work, and quite unaware where I was in the project.

Everything seemed to be going quite well and I was very pleased with how the dressers were turning out. I was down to the last step of applying the tung oil, but unfortunately, it would not pour. I looked into the bottle and gave it a gentle squeeze to see if it moved as I was afraid it had hardened. It did not move so I continued the squeezing process several more times, each time adding more pressure to the squeeze with no results. I finally squeezed the bottle as hard as I could and the tung oil came exploding out all over my head.

I went running to the inside garage door and banged my fist on the door to get Raymond to let me in. He opened the door, took one look at me and before I could say a word, rushed me to the sink, pushed my head in and turned on the cold water faucet to full force. I was sputtering trying to ask him what he was doing, but he was too busy shouting for me to be still and let him get the water on my head. I thought he was trying to drown me!

He finally let my head up and asked me if I was okay. I told him I was until he tried to kill me. He started asking me if I could see at the same time I was asking him what was wrong with him. He finally explained that having stripper all over me could be very caustic. That is when I told him it was tung oil and I really just wanted a towel. At that point he got really mad at me and went stomping off saying I had scared him for nothing.

We got over the incident, but the cold water had set the tung oil up in my hair and I had to wear the same lacquered hairstyle for about three weeks. I decided I would never use tung oil again.

I have had so many more handyman incidents over the years, I cannot count them, but the one I had last Saturday reminded me of the one with the tung oil. The current incident involved silicone and a caulk gun.

My youngest son’s tortoise tank needed to have the glass lamp top resealed. I had a tube of silicone, and I had used caulk in a caulk gun before, so how hard could it be? Probably not hard at all if the tube of silicone had cooperated.

I placed the tube in the caulk gun and started pulling the trigger. After a minute or so, I decided something was wrong, so I took the tube out of the caulk gun, examined it and started over. Nothing. Then the father of my son’s friend stopped by and I invited him in and he saw what I was doing. He said he could help. After several minutes of beating on the tube of silicone, triggering the caulk gun, etc., he came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the tube. I agreed and decided to cut the end of the tube off further and just squeeze it out onto the area I needed it, and that is what I did while talking to the man that had been helping. The silicone was coming out, I was smoothing down the seam, and everything seemed to be working great. The man left, and I started to clean up.

I have only worked with caulk. Caulk has always washed right off my hands. The silicone would not come off my hands with a towel, soap and water, Goop, or any other method I tried. Normally that would not been a problem as I would just keeping working at it until something removed the silicone from my hands, this time however, thanks to those lovely water pills I take to lower my blood pressure. I really had to go to the bathroom. It was obvious to me that I was getting ready to have an “I Love Lucy” moment.

I scrubbed my hands some more while crossing my legs so many times they looked like a piece of Twizzler candy and hopping up and down, while my youngest laughed. My hands were so sticky at this point that my fingers were stuck together, I had paper towels stuck to my palms, and I could not wait another minute to run to the bathroom.

It was an interesting experience. I hope I never have to unzip my jeans using only my two pinky fingers, with my legs crossed, and hopping up and down again. It is too much work. Maybe I should buy some Depends for the next time I decide to try to repair something.

It took me another thirty minutes or so to get all the silicone off my hands, but it gave me time to decide that my next project should be a tiara for the Queen of Unhandy.