Teflon Tape

The water hookup for our evaporative cooler had been leaking since I de-winterized it this year. It’s kind of a pain to get the ladder out and get up on the roof so I had been procrastinating on trying to fix it. When I got home from work on Monday Kari said she had starting having mild contractions and for some reason I decided that I needed to fix the leak right that moment – chalk it up to nesting I guess. I thought I had a minimum of several hours before things got serious and maybe as much as a few days. I also thought that I could get up on the roof and tighten the connection to fix the leak in just a few minutes.

I was wrong, really really wrong. We would be on the way to the hospital in less than two hours and my *quick* fix turned into a soaking wet ordeal that went on for 45 minutes before my lovely wife kindly suggested, between contractions, that it really wasn’t a good time for my little house project.

Once down from the roof I did what any man would do - I tried to explain the rational for abandoning my wife to do some dumb chore as she began to seriously labor with our first child. It turns out this was also the wrong thing to do…

Fast forward a bit – we got past the little incident and we now can laugh about my leaving her in her very important time of need. After the fact, Kari even says I was a wonderful, supportive and attentive husband during the delivery (once I got off the roof that is).

While telling the story to my father a few days later he did what any man would do – he laughed at my manly insensitivity and offered a solution to my leak problem. “Did you try Teflon tape?” he asked. I had never heard of the stuff but I sure do know about it now. The leak is fixed and we now have a nice cool house for our new baby and we aren’t leaking untold gallons of water all over the place.

Thanks for the advice, Dad. Hope I can do the same for my son some day.

And thanks for being an understanding and forgiving wife, Kari.