The Handy Man Can, The Handy Man Can. Can't He?

Like a cobbler's kids go barefoot, and the preacher's children are on an express elevator to Not-Heaven, I fear the Manison is going to burst into flame one of these nights from an electrical fire. Not to go all Aunt Josephine, and fret about a series of unfortunate events...but I think a man who made a career as a manager of facility maintenance would notice an anomaly in the wiring of his own abode.

Sure, I'm not paying him twice my once-upon-a-time salary to notice such things. But he can't be so oblivious to malfunctioning appliances. Isn't his back-creek neighbor, Bev, paying him to install new ceiling fans for her? It would only stand to reason that a man would notice a problem with his OWN ceiling fan.

Two evenings ago, I was looking for something in the master bedroom. Normally, I have no need for a light in there, since the sun shines in brightly at 9:00 a.m., through the louvers on the built-in mini-blinds of the french doors that overlook Poolio. And when I go to bed at 3:00 a.m., I don't turn on the light out of fear of courtesy for not waking Farmer H. But while he was gone to a volleyball game, and I was readying dog snacks, I thought of something I needed from there.

I flipped on the light switch by the door. It operates the ceiling lights which are part of the ceiling fan over the bed. Farmer H has souped it up with LED light bulbs brighter than the surface of the sun. I know that, because he often turns them on it the morning as he is getting himself ready for not-work. Since the heat wave this summer, he has left the fan on as well. Soon I will make him climb up on the bed and pull the chain to dis-enable those blades for the winter.

I'm not sure what has gone horribly wrong in the walls, but when I flipped on that light switch, everything worked as normal. For about 2.5 seconds. Then the lights went out, and the fan blades that were beginning to whir coasted to a stop. I pushed up that light switch again, kind of jiggled it, which worked the last time I had a flickering problem months ago. I haven't used the light since then, so it's probably been an ongoing problem getting worse.

This morning, I mentioned it to Farmer H, and he said, "Oh, I just need a new switch. I might even have one over in the BARn." Huh. So confident is he that the problem is in the switch. Not the walls. Not the fan-powering doodad in the ceiling. Not the fan itself.

We'll see what happens IF I DON'T BURN TO A CRISP. Tonight Farmer H made a trip to Lowe's, and said he was buying a new switch.

Let the record show that our front door knob is still not fixed from the problem it developed in January or February. Farmer H offered to take the doorknob off Sunday to take a look at it, but I remembered the last time he did that with the kitchen door. And found that it couldn't be fixed. Nor put back on like it was. And drove at that very moment down to Lowe's, a distance of 20 miles, with the door pushed-to with no latch, a red shop towel stuffed in the hole that should have held a doorknob, and snow swirling around the porch, the beginnings of 4 inches.

I'm really kind of glad I didn't marry a cobbler or a preacher.