Dear Will:

I’ve heard that Mark Twain once said: “Humor is tragedy plus time.” So it’s probably too soon for me to be sharing with you my most recent misadventures under the kitchen sink. For the rest of you, just watching it live from a few feet away would create sufficient time to transform the unfolding tragedy into double-you-over, spasmodic-giggle-inducing humor, but for the incompetent handyman who lived through the ordeal, it’s still a little hard to crack a smile.

I cracked just about every other part of my body, however. Any time you have to stick a bald head in a tight space you are pretty much inviting unsightly gashes. Meanwhile, my arms look as if I came out on the losing end of Fruit Ninja Live. The loss of blood isn’t that big of a deal—the stuff regenerates, right?—but the lost dignity may never be recovered.

First of all—just so that we’re all clear on this subject—we’re talking about plumbing here, and plumbing is evil. I’m pretty sure they’ve done studies to show that no plumbing project, no matter how innocuous or straightforward, has ever taken less than the entire day on which it was begun. And they have also shown that if there is an imminent event of some import—dinner guests, say, or perhaps the UCLA vs. USC football game, or maybe a looming Thanksgiving Day feast—or, God forbid, ALL THREE—the chances of everything going smoothly are less than zero. I don’t know how that math works out exactly, but it’s science, so it must be true.

So imagine my unbridled euphoria when we discovered a small, almost imperceptible drip under the sink last week. My expert diagnosis determined that the hose on the faucet was at fault. Well that seems simple enough, I thought. Just unscrew the old one and put in a new one. Even I can do that. [INSERT SPONTANEOUS, OFF-CAMERA LAUGHTER HERE.]

I will spare you the details—not that you wouldn’t enjoy them—but I just can’t bear to relive the whole thing. So I’ll give you my Saturday in a series of 140-characters-or-less tweets instead:

• [1:34 pm] That Price Pfister hose costs 70 bucks. Smarter to just replace the whole faucet. Heading to Costco. #priceypfister
• [3:49 pm] How do you loosen a corroded flange you can’t even reach? AND HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO PLUMBING WITHOUT SWEAR WORDS? #muffledgrunts
• [5:04 pm] Game’s starting and I don’t even have the old fixtures out yet. Bringing in Manuel for reinforcements. #nothappy #mannyfromheaven
• [6:29 pm] Home Depot. #lovemyDVR
• [7:08 pm] One last trip to Home Depot. #almostfinished #gobruins
• [7:29 pm] Back at Home Depot. #notamused #watchthegamewithoutme
• [8:02 pm] Home #$*&@% Depot.
• [8:43 pm] Fifth trip to Home Depot. Bruins win. Or so I’ve heard. #worstSaturdayever

And in all of this I’m leaving out the part about finishing at 10:30 pm, about smelling smoke when we turned on the dishwasher, about the visit from the electrician and the malfunctioning reverse osmosis system that we discovered after he left. But all of that is in the past. Today is Thanksgiving, and we have a brand new kitchen faucet, and were it not for the fact that last night we discovered something dripping under the kitchen sink, those pangs in my gut might be signs of hunger.

May your days be filled joy—rather than, say, humor—throughout this holiday season.

PW