Praise and adulation

I don't normally do this, but I'm going to use this blog to heap praise on my husband.

I live in a world of academics. This means that pretty much no one I know has any really practical skills. When they are drawing up the list of people to allow into the bunker at the end of the world, my friends and I better hope we can pool our collective book knowledge to build an effective bunker really really fast.

My dear husband, on the other hand, has real, practical skills. He's been fixing cars since he was sixteen, and he's smart, so he can translate everything he's learned from cars into other electronic and mechanical devices. He fixed our air conditioning back in Kentucky several times. He figured out how to fix our plumbing on a few occasions. He took apart our washing machine when it broke and figured out how the fix it, but it proved to be cheaper to replace it. Anyone who has ever met him knows exactly where to go when their computer won't work (my sister drove 45 miles for an emergency repair last weekend).

A friend of mine who is going through some rough times lately has recently added the insult of her car making a horrible noise. It sounded like when you were a kid and you put baseball cards in the spokes of your bike tires. She stopped by the house after we went out this evening and my dear husband took her car for a spin around the block. He pulled it back into the driveway, leapt out, popped the hood and pulled out the dipstick.

He sent her off with three quarts of oil (the only person I know who would have that on hand) and advice to call him at work on Monday because she might have a leak. She called later to report that the noise had stopped.

So not only does he have some pretty useful skills, but he uses them for good instead of evil.