it's not broken...it just has a great patina.

The behemoth icicle clusters, (one is pictured 3 post down,) finally fused into solid columns of ice, hooked to the roof at the top, and a frozen pool at the bottom. I’ve been worried all along, wondering if and when I should remove them before they release themselves. Afraid the support at the bottom they had now established would cause upward pressure against the soffit and the slate shingles, I decided to hack the leg off. It took a saw, a clean cut and a solid push to the stalagmite portion, but as we left to pick up Gabe from afternoon carpool, it appeared the remaining hanging portions would finally lose their grip. They did. And the one on the right took a couple half-shingles with it.

Clearly I made a wrong move, but there I was feeling newly overwhelmed by unfinished work, entropy, and an unfortunate dearth of resident handy people. I’m usually good at shutting up, and putting a happy face on it, but temporarily I wasn’t, and I lamented--out loud--that I didn’t know what we’d do, but I’d have to find a way out of maintenance that neither one of us is capable of.

Alzheimer’s is so weird. And so fraught with Catch-22s. If you haven’t done a lick of handy work in 4 years, and the last licks you attempted resulted in disastrous butcherings of door jambs and locksets, how odd that your brain still allows you to think you’re completely capable. I could do it said Jeff. A part of me still wants to apply reason rather than fib. You can’t, I said. You can’t, because the Alzheimer’s messed up the part of your brain that could do that work.

Of course he didn’t believe me. By corollary to the first conundrum, the AD-damaged brain will also not observe that walking outside in February without your coat, because you don’t like the point your wife attempted to make is not a particularly winning way to demonstrate that she’s mistaken about your level of function.

I am not kicking myself with much force. Faking that you’ve got it under control all the time is bound to fail. There will be holes in the fabric, and sometimes rips.

I have dispatched emails to two people who might know handymen-for-hire. And I’ve got a another phone number--someone my mom’s used--as another possibility. But maybe the trick is to save my money, and save the work until I can consider moving. Can I move Jeff? Will the house disintegrate around me? Am I whiny? (maybe don’t answer that.) I will think on it all, dream up a long term plan, and set the bellyaching dial to a very low hum.