A manly woman??

The day after my kitchen flooding mishap, I was at work during an unexpected (and rare) lull in the usual pace on my unit. Of course, I am always willing to tell a story to an audience, so I related my kitchen/basement "rain" incident to my friends at work. One of the nurses wanted to know how badly my kitchen floor was damaged, and I explained that for whatever reason, the former owners had installed Pergo flooring over perfectly good hardwood. I further explained that I thought the hardwood could survive the mishap but didn't really care about the Pergo, as I was in the process of restoring all of the hardwood floors in the place anyway.

So another nurse asked me how hard (no pun intended, heh) it was to restore a hardwood floor. I quickly went through the steps for her, explaining the process of repair, sanding, applying stain or Polyurethane, etc. And, of course, being the honest person that I am, I did admit that my father helped me with the sanding part, because the large machine used to sand the main part of the floor can cause grooves if you don't know what you are doing (and I certainly didn't at that point).

In the middle of this, a male nurse made some kind of comment to the effect that I was a man, presumably because I knew all this stuff about home improvement. I filed the comment away in my mind as "not worth responding to," but when I got home and began to think about it, the narrow-mindedness of it really amazed me. Since when does some knowledge of tools and the desire to renovate my own house require that I be a man? After I had thought about it for awhile, I realized that I could have either 1. asked him what century he was from and 2. told him that based upon that sort of assumption, I would have to assume that he was a woman, since nursing is a field that is mostly populated by women.

But for now, I'll just keep on working on this old house of mine, knowing that my ovaries and my hammer are more than able to co-create without any added testosterone. So there.