THE OLD HOUSE DOCTOR 10-31-09

TIS THE SEASON TO...OH, FORGET IT

You think you’re so smart.

You sit there in your ergonomically correct vibrating chair shaped like a big hand, sipping Benedictine and looking smug. You fondle your diploma (is that what they’re calling it these days?) from the Bedford Institute of Eclectic Imagineering and think about the goodle days, when you dated girls with names like Muffy and Candace, while living in the frat house with Mitch and Biff. Maybe you were dating them too, I dunno.

You think you’re so smart.

The problem with people like you is that you are educated in things like Political Snarkyness and Management Through the Business End of a Fountain Pen. Then your sink backs up and you have to turn to people like me to save your smarmy ass. Or like Cletis the Plumber, who purposefully forgets to wear a belt so he can give your wife a show when he bends down to fix the sink. Or maybe it’s for your benefit. I saw you looking.

These things always seem to happen right around the Holidays, when Todd and Buffy are over for Roast Suckling Duckling raised on fois gras and truffles in a politically correct farmyard. While listening to Mozart.

And it’s all because you never learned how to fix anything around your house. You were too snooty to pick up a wrench and a claw hammer.

Now you need to beg my help.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HOO HOO HOO HEE HEE ug gluckle braaaaaaap!

‘Scuse me.

Have you gone around your house, closing foundation vents so the crawlspace will stay warm through the winter? Have you tapped on your gutter downspouts to locate clogs, then flushed them with a hose? Of course you haven’t. You’re too busy watching “Let’s Eat Us a Millionaire” and reruns of “CSI-PDF-IRT-LBJ-Indio.” Oh, yes, precious. I know you only too well.

Have you gotten naked on the floor to find out where the cold air is coming from? No, of course not. Have you climbed the tree in the front yard to wave your newly-painted butt at the neighbors? Okay, maybe you should think twice about that one.

But I’ll bet you haven’t bought any ice-melt, have you? How are you going to get to the squash court when it freezes, or to the BMW dealer? For God’s sake, man, your car is almost four months old! How long are you going to wait to trade it in?

Have you made sure all your storm windows are closed? Of course you haven’t. You have insulated replacement windows that don’t NEED storms. You cretin. You probably didn’t even know that storm windows exist, or that they need to be checked to see that they’re completely closed. There are starving children in New Guinea that don’t even have any storm windows.

What about the cat? Have you fitted it with earmuffs and galoshes? You don’t have a cat? Sure, I’ll bet you’ve got a thoroughbred dog like an Albanian Snood Terrier or a Mongolian Water Spaniel or a Plutonian Gyroscopic Needle Hound. Well, there’s no use in telling you to make sure it has a dry, warm place to get out of the weather when it’s outside, because I’m sure it never GOES outside. It probably never leaves its eighteenth-century antique couch except when its manservant has to dust beneath it, and then it’s put onto its OTHER eighteenth-century couch. But only for a few seconds.

Is the weatherstripping around the door sealing properly? Have you opened the flue to the chimney before starting the first fire of the season? THAT would be a riot. Of course you’d ask Jeeves to do it, because any type of manual labor would just ruin your manicure, and you must avoid calluses at all costs. What would they say down at The Club?

“Oh, look! Quigley’s been opening doors by himself again! My, My! Soon he’ll be lifting his own fork! Let Jeeves do it, old man! That’s what we’ve got servants for! Other than for flogging, that is. Now where did I put my gold encrusted diamond-handled putter?”

I’m sure you haven’t put anti-freeze into the toilet bowls and tanks out at the lake house. That’s what normal people do when their seldom-used vacation houses haven’t been occupied for weeks or months in the winter. People do that with untenanted rent houses, too. Rent houses. RENT hou… What? You don’t know what a rent house is? That figures.

I’d tell you to stock up on candles and easily-prepared foods for power outages. That’s what we poor people do anyway. You must think that it’s quaint that we with electric ovens and stoves have to use our charcoal grills for cooking when the ice takes down the lines. I’m sure you keep warm by burning servants. They do tend to crackle and pop, though, after they get going pretty good.

Well, I don’t know if I’ve left anything out. Gutters, storms, foundation vents, blackout supplies. None of them are really of any importance to you, anyway. You’ll be off to Staad next week for a skiing vacation with Muffy before flying to The Seychelles to bask on the black sand beaches while eating snow-leopard steaks and sipping tropical drinks made with liquor fermented from morel mushrooms. By the time you return, you’ll be staying in your Central Park West Condo, then you’ll jet to Hawaii for the rest of the winter. You really don’t have to worry about winterizing your house at all, do you.

Especially when you left the keys with Cletis and me.

PARTY TIME!!!!

Got a gripe or a question, or want to learn more about Plutonian Gyroscopic Needle Hounds? Me too. Write me at king.oldhousedoctor@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to ignore you, you stoner, you.