My husband, the Toolman

Up to now I have only written about myself and Schnickelfritz.  I have been happily married for seven years to my dear husband and am happy to talk about him, I just hadn't come up with a pseudonym for him yet.  Now I have one--Toolman, as in Tim the Toolman from "Home Improvement." Here's the story behind it. 

Our co-op was having its recital to celebrate the end of the spring semester and Fritz's grandparents were coming to town for the show.  I decided to host a barbeque the day before and invite the family over so my mom could catch up with her mother, sister and brothers.  In honor of the coming of warm weather I planned to make homemade ice cream for dessert.  Year's ago, when we'd visited Amish country in northern Indiana we had purchased a six-quart, hand-cranked White Mountain freezer.

As a child, my job was to sit on the freezer and balance it.  As an adult I'm more than willing to do my share of the cranking.  The way I figure it, the more calories I burn while making the ice cream, the more calories I can consume when it's ready.  I just asked my husband to help out at the end when the cranking gets really hard.  He disappeared while I was preparing the ice cream recipe and I told my mom "I'll bet he's rigging something up in the garage. "  As a teen, he was  co-inventor of  a machine to crank six freezers at once for a booth at the county fair, so one machine should be a piece of cake.

I was right. He had taken the handle off the crank and installed a large bolt on the bar.  This bolt could be turned with an adapter on his 1/2" drive drill--this drill comes with an extra handle to hold for the torque.  In the back of my mind I could hear Tim Allen's caveman grunt and "More Power!!"

The only problem was the drill wasn't designed to be used for so long. The motor started to heat up and smell funny.   There wasn't enough air flowing through the motor to cool it off at the slow speed.  The trigger was rather sensitive and whenever my Toolman would try to speed the motor to improve airflow the canister lid would fly off and the half frozen concoction would flick everywhere.  This happened three times before we decided to put the tried and true handle back on the freezer and finish the job the old fashioned way.