The Macgyver of domesticity

Boquete, Panama, March 28, 2007

I want to pat myself on the back a little because Katé´s given me a new title that I´m pretty proud of, and that I´d like to share. The other night she called me, "The Macgyver of domesticity." And, as far as monikers go, I´m pretty sure I´ll never get a better one than that.

When you say it out loud, it has that ring that a perfectly coined phrase sometimes does. Like it could have been a command from an all-powerful being. Something like, "Turn and gaze upon your destiny, my son, for you have been chosen. You are the Macgyver of domesticity." (In my imagination, the being is a wizard who sounds like James Earl Jones and we´re standing on a hill looking out over Middle Earth, and I´m thinking, "God, it´s going to take forever to set up all those wirless internet systems.")

Anyway, Kate says I´ve always got a project of some kind going, which is true. And she says she loves me because I make everything work, which is also true. Well, at least true for our aged and infirm laptop, for which, in the last couple of weeks, I have built a new DVD player from internet software, set up a program and new drivers for the iPod that actually created a new drive through the USB port, and managed to get a gray-market Chinese wireless internet card to pick up a speedy internet connection from our favorite corner bar, Amigos. Awesome.

I´m bragging, but I feel pretty good about it, and I love the computer for continuing to work. It´s seven years old and has Windows 98 as its operating system and only works when it´s plugged in. And it gets so hot when it´s running that we´ve been setting it on top of packages of frozen vegetables just so we can watch an entire movie without burning anything.

But, man, being able to watch movies and listen to music makes life so much sweeter. What did people do before digital technology? Sit and talk?

Some other projects of late include daily systematic sweeps of our apartment for culprit allergens and mosquitos. Pretty much from the time that we moved in to the place, I´ve been down and out with a cold that, I´m convinced, was brought on by the hand-me-down mattress and pillows that furnish the place. So far, in an attempt to bring the apartment up to the hermetically sealed standard that we´re used to, I have done the following:

-covered both pillows and the entire mattress in roughly 150 square feet of saran wrap

-set out a score of roach traps and spent varying amounts of time nightly trying to coax the roaches in the general direction of their death

- combined a system of spotlights (headlamps) and heavy breathing (sleep) with Kate´s naturally catlike reflexes to control the mosquito population. (In essence, I fall asleep with the headlamp in my hand pointed at the ceiling. Kate wakes me up when she hears the mosquito buzzing in her ears, and then, using both headlamps, we follow and corner the mosquito, and make the final assault with a combination of hands, magazines, and semi-automatic weapons.

Seriously, though, the bug problem here is minimal, so I can´t even begin to imagine what it´s going to be like in the lowland jungle. What I envision is a Heart of Darkness scenario with the character of Kurtz being played by me, and the adoring natives by an army of geckos that I´ve captured and trained to protect me from the insect population (imagine 3 - 5,000 geckos surrounding a bed covered in mosquito netting where Kate and I sleep peacefully). Also, they will carry me around in a litter.

Ummm... anyway that´s about it, but to round out the whole Macgyver thing. Oddly, the day that Kate gave me the nickname was the same day that I broke Fernando´s ladder. And, the next day when we were talking to our teacher, Ins, about funny gringo Spanish mistakes like broken ladders and painting bottoms, she told us that, while she was trying to get into bed the previous night (she and Fernando sleep on a top bunk single bed when they´re here in Boquete) she asked Fernando how she was supposed to get in without a ladder, and he used a verb that she hadn´t heard before: he told her to "just Macgyver it". And, you can´t help but love a language that includes, among its verbs, "to Macgyver".