Home maintenance isn’t any fun, no matter where you live. Here, in the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico), it’s even less fun and a whole lot more expensive.  The environment is beautiful but harsh and, if you don’t take care of little problems when they present themselves, you can end up living in a sandbox with views.  It’s also a good place to be handy because it’s not unusual for workers to not show up.

A few weeks ago, we had a window man check a window that was leaking due to a rare rain storm in Santa Fe. Within a minute he told us "There is nothing wrong with your window. That'll be sixty-five dollars, please, thank you very much." But he also told us that our stucco looked a little compromised, so we called our stucco guy.

The stucco guy, who arrived after dark a few days later, said, "You have a crack. You need caulk. Clear caulk." Clearly, I needed caulk, so off I went to Lowe's in pursuit of caulk. Unfortunately, they had the wrong kind of caulk. So, next stop: Home Depot.

"What do you need?" a man in an orange apron asked me with a big smile on his face (where else would it be?). "I need caulk," I said. His smile got a little broader. He told me where to go and, lo and behold, the caulk aisle was temporarily closed down while some guy tried to get a gigantic box (probably of caulk) off a high shelf without killing himself or shoppers pursuing caulk.

They didn't have the right caulk, either. I was looking for GE Supreme Caulk and all they had was DAP Premium Caulk. After much chin stroking and facial contortions, I figured a little DAP would do me and I picked up a couple of tubes just in case the stucco guy actually showed up. Just for the hell of it, I also went to Big Jo's to see if they had GE Supreme Caulk. They didn't. The salesman led me to Lexel, a caulk I had never heard of before and I fled. I just couldn't handle getting strange caulk.

When I got home, I went online and looked up the pronunciation of caulk. "Cawk! Cawk!" cawed the computer voice. Considering the looks I was getting, I wanted to make sure I was saying it right.  All I can say is it’s a good thing we don’t live in New England.

I was afraid I was going to lose it when the stucco guy came and asked me if I got caulk today. Yes, I did. I was just hoping I wouldn’t get stucco (or need stucco – or anything else for this freaking house).  I didn’t actually have anything to worry about because the stucco guy never came.  Big surprise.  And, since my husband, Grant, was home making music with a friend in the living room while I was out searching for caulk all day, it was time for him to take the matter into his own hands. 

So, my husband, the alte caulker, put on his Japanese war bonnet, got out his ladder, inserted his caulk into one of those caulking contraptions and did the job himself.  Almost. Grant left a few random cracks around, maybe anticipating that at some point before we died the stucco guy would actually show up and be looking for something to do. 

It’s a good thing Grant got up there because it did pour the next day and he saved our computers from getting watered.  I was so thrilled that I put out the word of his success on Facebook and got admonished by an old friend of his for allowing a person of his (and her) age to get up on a ladder.  Hey, who’s asking her to get up on a ladder?  I reassured her that the house was only one story high and had a flat roof from which we have some truly spectacular views. 

Fast-forward two weeks and a day.  I’m napping in our front room probably trying to recover from replacing sheetrock or getting birds of prey out of our flue when I am awakened by the sound of our doorbell.  Our doorbell makes our house sound like the Church of England on the day a member of the royal family dies.  I look out but don’t see anyone and, since I’m pretty addled anyway, I try to go back to sleep. 

That’s when I notice a head bobbing outside my window.  The person who rang the doorbell was, you guessed it – the stucco man.  Turns out that instead of coming to our house to do the job he was supposed to do for us two weeks before, he decided to drive his parents down to Mexico instead.  You’d have thought he would have known the night before that he was going to be taking a ride to another country the next morning instead of coming to our house to deal with our cracks. But, no.

As he ran around the house, he noticed that most of our cracks had already been filled. He found the few that Grant had left unfilled but instead of using the clear caulk he had asked us to get, he was using a caulk that had the color and consistency of ejaculate.

He was making our house look like it had snakes slithering down its sides.  Fortunately, my husband got home in time to keep him from turning the whole place into a reptile exhibit. And, yes, we did pay him anyway.  Don’t ask me why.  It’s the way things work around here.  Or maybe we’re just idiots.

For his next project, Grant wants to vista-prune our property because he’s determined to see mountains from every room in the house, including the rooms that don’t have windows.  This usually requires a chainsaw and a pick-axe.  Grant likes to do these projects bare-chested and hurls himself into trees to maximize the potential of impaling himself.  Again, don’t ask me why.  I’m afraid he’s going to cut his nipples off someday and I don’t want to be around when that happens.

At least he wears a hat.

Cawk! Cawk!