Fiddling away: Brad on a slippery metal roof singing "If I were a rich man..."

 Without warning, my husband stood before me, blocking my view of the television. "I have a question for you," he stated as I leaned pointedly to the left. I glanced at him. Maybe he wanted to offer me my choice of three different restaurant options for supper tonight. Or maybe he was wondering how I managed to still maintain my youthful glow and startlingly good looks after twenty-seven years of marriage. Maybe he wanted to clarify the size of my ring finger...

"Would you want to have a contractor install metal roofing for $4000 or install it ourselves for $2000?" he asked. Kudos, Brad Mosiman, I thought to myself, leaning back in my chair to look appraisingly at him with equal parts admiration and disgust. He had me in checkmate and I hadn't even realized that the game had started. It was a no-win question. Option A would leave me looking lazy and wasteful. But you ARE lazy and wasteful, my small lazy and wasteful inner voice whined. And whiny, it added.

Naturally, hindsight would prove that that $4000 would have been TOTALLY worth it but that was well after Sydney and I squealed with delight and then fought for the privilege of using scissors that cut STEEL. As I'm sure you (and Bryan Adams) could have predicted, the notoriety wore off quickly. They didn't cut like a knife. They didn't feel so right. "Where are you going," Brad shouted at me. "I have to eat a banana," I yelled back, "I have a hand cramp."

On days when it was just me and the man of my dreams, I often considered kicking the ladder out from underneath him. As he waited, from the considerable safety of the roof, I would heave a panel of steel roofing that was longer than my mini-van into the air and stagger towards him. Swaying beneath the weight of this ludicrous land-sail, I'd aim at Brad who would shout encouraging words to me that cannot be published in my PG-rated blog. My neighbor, Jimmy, busy with the harvest, sat idling in his tractor in front of my house, howling with laughter as an inopportune wind came up, blowing me completely off-course. Loving my neighbor as myself wasn't my goal as I "waved" to Jimmy.

When steel-cutting scissors weren't enough, Brad would employ an electric saw and then spend twenty minutes to unearth Sydney and I from our hiding spots. "All you have to do is hold the sheet," he'd grumble but the shrapnel sparks that flew off his blade singed our skin, making us ashamed of all the times we'd complained about cooking bacon. "Look," I snarled later, as I extracted a microscopic shard of metal from my eye, "you could have blinded me. And at what cost...? Yes...that's right! $2000?!?"  Brad showed me a two inch metal sliver laying a parallel path alongside the vein in his forearm while quietly commenting that saving the two grand hadn't been HIS idea. Drat-it-all! Thwarted again! Time to up my game.

"We're going to lay some heat-flashing," Brad explained patiently while I pretended to listen. Tired after having retrieved his requested drill from the garage..."Is it this one?" I'd ask after lugging choice Number One around the perimeter of the property. "No," Brad said, drumming his fingers on the steel roof from the top of his ladder as he repeated the name of the drill. Ten minutes later, I held up Drill Number Two for his inspection. "No," Brad replied in a somewhat snippy tone. Rather than return for a third try, I sank to the ground. "What are you doing," Brad asked. "Union break," I answered. The tide was finally turning.

The tsunami struck shortly after. Wedged where the garage roof meets the lawn, I was unceremoniously squatting while holding the gutter in place for Brad to afix. "Don't move," Brad instructed while I swayed uncertainly. With the femur muscles of an Olympic power lifter, Brad can squat with conviction...for hours. IF I can actually get down into a squat, I can remain there for approximately thirty seconds. "Is it straight," Brad asked, using one of his thousands of drills to screw the gutter in. "Yes," I gasped, before wobbling over like one of those punch-in-the-face inflatable clowns. Brad's precious gutter came crashing down after me. No worries, actually. It hadn't been straight anyway. Brad shared his feelings with me in a prolific way. I shared the irony that we were standing at opposite ends of a gutter.

Thank goodness we saved that $2000. That was about what we would pay out for marital counseling.