What’s a year anyway?

“Remind me I need to call that fucker at 9 o’clock this morning,” my wife Marsha said as she and I lay in bed.

Which fucker is that? I asked. Is it the pool fucker, the tile fucker, the countertop fucker, the designer fucker, how about the plumber fucker?”

“Nah,” she said, half-smiling. “He’s actually OK.”

A lot of work has sort of been getting done to our house and lately this line of conversation has amounted to being our pillow talk. You see, we had a teensy weensy pipe leak in the wall of the guest bath that shot a teensy but high pressured stream of water into the drywall of the adjacent bedroom until it finally bore through. We don’t use that bathroom or bedroom much so we didn’t notice the rising tide. It was actually more like a quarter of an inch, but it was everywhere and the damage was extensive.

That was in June of 2021. It’s now nearly May of 2022.

“It’s the insurance fucker!” we said in head-nodding unison.

The pool fucker got Covid, the painter’s wife left him, the plumber’s truck’s transmission went out, the countertop guy took our $5K and left for Mexico to attend his father’s funeral — although something tells me he’s used this line. A few times. The tile guys said they’d be back in 3 weeks. No story or excuse to that at all. They simply packed up their tools and left.

Now the countertop guy, the day he did show up after many no-shows, said he’d be back with the countertop in X days and blah blah blah. So on his word, we removed our sink, the stove and dishwasher and well, yeah, the counter. That was a month ago.

If you think being cooped up for two years during Covid was hard on a marriage, try tacking on six months living in a torn up house.

And, you’d think after all this time and all those phone calls and all these contractor types trudging through our door to measure this and that and sit and chat for an hour and then never come back, we’d have a pretty good idea about how to go about this. (Maybe that’s where our missing coffee mugs went.) But to be honest we couldn’t give recommendations on reliable home improvement contractors because we still don’t know any. However, we are experts on those you won’t want to hire. We hit the jackpot with them.

Remember our swear jars? You can’t imagine. No one could. And if you think the price of gas is high, have you bought paper plates lately?

Our latest sort-of general contractor and designer came by last week after we pleaded with them to try to pull all these strings together. They reassured us they would and that we should absolutely go on this hiking and sightseeing trip to Utah we’d been planning since before Covid. That they’d take care of everything.

We haven’t heard back from them either. We’re supposed to leave tomorrow.

Fuckers.