Jason, Plumber Extraordinaire

If you know me well, you know that I have a very limited set of mechanical abilities.  In fact, I am a regular student at the School for the Mechanically Declined.  However, I'm not ashamed to boast that I have gotten better at doing things with my hands than I used to be.  Giancarlo has actually taught me a few things, as he is actually pretty handy compared to me.  Why, since I met him, I've become a regular light bulb changer, and I know how to properly place a roll of toilet paper on the toilet paper holder thingy. (What is that called anyway?  A receptacle?  No.  A dispenser?  No.  A holder?  A thingy?  A whatzits?)  

I've even learned to drill stuff.  What stuff?  Oh, I don't know,  just stuff.  Be quiet.

Our kitchen faucet has been slowly deteriorating.  First, the part that pulls out so you can squirt things became very difficult to pull out, and then it got stuck in the all the way pulled out position.  I managed to get it back in by reaching under and giving the hose a good hard yank.  Get your mind out of the gutter!  I'm still talking about the kitchen faucet.  

Then the faucet wouldn't rotate back and forth anymore.  So I  used my brute strength to manhandle it back and forth in order to break away all of the rust and corrosion that had formed underneath, causing it to get stuck.

Finally, last week, it got to the point where it just wouldn't turn off anymore.  So I'd slam my hand down on the handle and give it a good twist, which would somehow stop it from leaking.  But that only worked for a few days.

With a big sigh, both Giancarlo and I decided it was time to replace it.  So in the middle of my cooking falafel with naan and making a taboule salad, Giancarlo and Diego headed to Lowe's to buy a new kitchen faucet.

After a great deal of struggle, naughty words muttered under my breath, rust specks in my eye, a couple more trips to Lowe's, and a falafel  mix that was way too watery, along with an oldest daughter who just didn't understand the concept of falafel, we did it!  All on our own!  We replaced our old, problematic faucet with this big boy:

Oh yeahhhhhh.  That's what I'm talkin' about.  I love this faucet so much, I think I want to marry it.  Or something much like marriage.  Maybe I just want it to be my concubine.  Yes, that's it.  I want this bad ass faucet to be my concubine.

And we did it all without a plumber.  At least, not a professionally trained one.

Never mind the fact that we have to put a big bucket under the sink to catch all the water spewing from the tube connections, and that it has to be emptied every half hour, which  is a real bummer when you're trying to sleep through the night.  But we're not wasting the water.  We dump the water into buckets that we keep next to our toilets and flush only with the leaky sink water.  Just kidding!  You guys are so gullible.