I just Googled "Saint Matilda" and found out that she is the patron saint of misbehaving children.

What a polar bear...

Thanks all! I am leaning towards 3, but I will have to think about it overnight.

Am I a bad person if I ignore the destruction sounds coming from the kitchen, where Bubba is?

sarameg, did you have book recs on learning the basics of DIY home stuff? Basics of plumbing and such? I need something like the Joy of Cooking for a house.

Sadly, nsm. Most was learned from the house growing up, random google, shadowing the workers I hired via my house warranty people for systems foreign to me and beth's Matt (excellent resource for wood work stuff.) Parents gave me a find from the cheapy sales table : Black&Decker's Photo Guide to Home Repair which has been useful for things like painting techniques on paneled doors and "uh, I get the mechanics of that, but me doing that would end in tears, damnit." It does have basic plumbing stuff (that I already know) as well as some more advanced. I'd hit a bookstore and browse the shelves to figure out what language (and issues touched on) speak to you.

My biggest trepidation was the furnace, and the home warranty guy explained the whole mess to me, while doing his thing. The rest of the plumbing...well, I know where the turnoff is, I can replace a faucet or valve, but when the mainlines upstairs finally leak (they are 81 year old iron pipes) I KNOW WHERE THE SHUTOFF IS, and then I call in the big guns and resign myself to doing dishes at the neighbors' and showering at the Y for a bit. (Obsessive much!)

Yup, I've had that said to me multiple times and it almost always meant, yeah I got acclimated to you and forgot you were a minority and said something racist in front of you, but I can't take my life lesson of having gotten to know you and discovered you were a person and use that to challenge my other racist assumptions, so instead I now have to exclude you from those other bad minorities I know nothing about and am still racist towards, but that's ok with you, right, because you're one of the good ones.

But you know, that's a mouthful, so it's easier to say, oh, I don't think of you as Japanese. Well, fuck you, because I am.

Didn't readers digest or somebody do a big home repairs manual? That's what I use, the do it yourself/fix it yourself books. From them I learned how to shim a door, replace a faucet gasket and change a filter.

JZ, I either have to ignore evo psych guy or tell him to just go back to his cave because I have things in this century that I need to attend to.

Oh that's a good one to look for, Liese, thanks. There's some stuff that, with a guide, I can totally do. Though for things like turning the gas on for the dryer to actually heat when it wasn't? I called the utility. Yes, I am 99% sure what needs to happen but it's explosive and not in the fun, Fire Pretty way. But I think I can fix the toilet. I just need a diagram and stuff.

I miss Powell's.

My problem is that I'm the sort of person who, with a book, or say, the internet, believes she can do anything described therein. Which leads to things like my trash can still being filthy with laser toner because my googlefu allows me to find service manuals when I really shouldn't have them and the subsequent dismantling of laser printers turns out to be ever so slightly more complicated than it looked in the picture.

The Reader's Digest book is very useful. I am also a big proponent of asking old dudes at hardware stores.

But you know, that's a mouthful, so it's easier to say, oh, I don't think of you as Japanese.

I don't think of you as Japanese. I think of you as a Cylon.