Building My Portfolio

I applied for a job today, making it a good day. Looking at another job, I again thought, "If only I had something about that in my work experience portfolio." Instead of letting that squeeze me through the knothole of insecurity, I thought about the value of work. It is a capricious thing.

My first thought was the memory of reading a resume of a student assistant who listed as a skill his comfort with operating power tools. "Big whoop," I thought but in less kind terms. In hindsight, there were times at ugly public meetings I ran that the value of applying his skill set would have been invaluable.

Mentally popping back further in history, I thought about the early women's movement. I wonder if there are feminists still working to quantify the value of being a mother. That would include:  all that goes into parenting (intimidating enough on its own without all of the paramedic, logistics, budgeting and nutritional/thermodynamics science involved) ; relighting a pilot light or clearing a flooded carburetor as my mother did, among her many other "more womanly" skills like refinishing furniture and sewing my clothes;  knowing what old wives tale to apply to any given cleaning conundrum; and countless other tasks that, when a dad does them makes him so cute and just the best.

Yes, that was an unfair shot at fathers, especially mine. He taught me how to ride and train horses. He made no distinction between what a girl (me) and a boy (my brother) should learn. We both knew how to change the oil in the family cars and, with Dad, built a Bradley GT with a kit, and a Volkswagen chassis and power train. He taught us the basics of electricity and plumbing, either out of the deadline for a school science experiment or household exigency. I can solder. Learned that building the model train set. And on and on. 

Both of our parents' greatest lessons to each us were curiosity and critical thinking. Wonder how it works, how it should work, how it can work better. Sure, that led Ed and me to disassemble a capacitor and blow ourselves across his room one dull summer afternoon (followed by our shrilly innocent duet, "Nothing!" in response to our mother's shout from downstairs, "What are you kids doing up there?"

Maureen, wisely, doesn't usually bother to ask. When she has, the answer has been anything from, "Whittling a book stand out of the pruned redwood offshoot," to, "Seeing what is inside of a eucalyptus nut." I also save us a fair amount of handyindividual money. Electricity scares me (no doubt informed by the aforementioned capacitor incident) but the only thing that stops me from any plumbing project is not being able to make the wrench budge. I'm pretty darned good with spackle and bathtub sealant, too. And the whole yard maintenance thing, a.k.a. forestry management, is my bailiwick exclusively. 

This week, I intend to add sheet rock repair to my portfolio. We haven't painted the bathrooms since we moved in 20 years ago and, for whatever it was that inspired me, now is the time. Our house, like all those in the Oakland hills, shifts around. That means cracks in the sheet rock joints, as shown below. I did the research and now own enough repair supplies to possibly even tackle the four-foot horizontal crack in our basement that opens between 1/2 and two inches, depending on the season and the moisture of the soils beneath the house. I'll see how well this relatively straightforward bathroom project goes first.