The Toilet Queen

Well, strike up the marching band and scatter the rose petals. I am the Duchess of Dookieville.

I fixed the toilet.

It's just a little thing I thought I'd try. It's been decades since I could trade on my looks and even then I was just scraping by. I've always gotten a lot further with my sense of humor. But these days people are liable to just stare at you when you crack wise about the old Studebaker and having to go stand in line at the bank for money. I've decided to learn how to do some shit myself in case all my dwindling powers of ingratiation leave me stranded.

The toilet would be a big deal. I don't know much about plumbing but I do know it can make grown men cry and throw things. I do know every time I noticed a new plumbing issue, I would attach a note to the dog and send her out to find Dave. I do know that he would invariably tackle the job and eventually solve it but not without skinned knuckles, bruised ears for blocks around, and eighteen trips to the hardware store. Plumbing involves striking a balance between one's brute strength and the sensitivities of the pipes in question. Things need to be Goldilocks tight and no tighter or looser, but the little blonde is long gone. You think Papa Bear is scary? Give him a plumbing project.

I figured if I could fix the toilet myself I'd have enough credits lined up to allow me to be a jerk for weeks. Dave and I are very close to our toilets. You wouldn't believe how close, really. Downright intimate.

The toilet in question still worked, after a fashion. You could flush it and everything. It just took a day and a half to fill up again. You'd want to do the very best job you could before you flushed, because you were going to have to wait three whistleblower scandals and a paid-off porn queen before you got another flush out of it. I was puzzled. Then I realized there must be debris in the uppy-downy contraption where the water comes back in. I you-tubed it. My diagnosis was sound.

The trick is to get in there and screw off the tippy-top of the uppy-downy and flush it out. This was a little fraught because all the parts were plastic, and reluctant, and you don't want to snap anything off that can't be resnapped later. But I did it. Then you hold a cup over the top of the valve and turn the water back on. We have excellent water pressure. I nearly drove the cup into the ceiling. Then you put everything back together again and hope for the best. A body can hope, right?

Sure enough I flushed the toilet and the water came charging back into the tank. I was the Toilet Queen! Bow down before me! Run a damp towel and some Lysol around the floor while you're down there!

The next time I flushed we were right back where we started.

This was, I'm sure, a direct result of the dishwasher fiasco. The installers insisted I bring in a plumber to fix the shutoff valve and the plumber turned off the water for the house. When he turned it on again, all the faucets and toilets made an explosive horking sound the first time they were used. I figure rust nuggets from 1926 are on the loose and one of them was now a Toilet Bolus.

Which means the entire uppy-downy thing needed to be replaced. That was eight and a half bucks of potential glory in one little box. The hardware store lady said it was easy. I wasn't born even close to yesterday. I ratcheted my expectations way down. But it was easy. Even all the little nuts and washers spun right off and back on again. I was a hero. I was the Countess of Caca.

Dave taught me long ago that an essential step in any successful personal project is to grab a beer and position a chair so that you can admire your work. It's a little tight in that room, but I'm going for it.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019, was World Toilet Day: "Leave No One Behind."

The Devil Toilet

It was three in the morning, right on schedule for these sorts of things, when Dave noticed a cascade of water coming out of the light fixture in the ceiling. He is a sharp fellow and deduced almost at once that something was amiss. Naturally, it was coming from the Devil Toilet. He turned off the water supply and tried to get back to sleep while contemplating a day spent plumbing. You'd have to pluck your nostril hairs at a leaf-blower concert to achieve a similar sedative effect.

It is a testament to Dave that he will always tackle a plumbing emergency even though nothing in this world makes him more wretched. And he's perfectly generous about spreading his wretchedness around to anyone within swearing distance. Every incident provokes a dozen trips to the hardware store and one to the whiskey store. I used to tie notes to the dog whenever I needed to tell Dave something was leaking.

The Devil Toilet has been a pain under the ass ever since it was installed. It's in the guest bathroom, and we never asked much of it. It just needed to be white and inexpensive, and when a super low-flow model was presented to us, we said fine. When you push the flush handle, it pins your ears back and blasts you right out of the room. It sounds like the space shuttle taking off. There isn't even any water in the tank. The tank just has a large rubber mystery bulb in it filled, apparently, with jet fuel. You most certainly do not want to be seated on the thing while you flush. The vacuum will suck in your entire fanny, making the toilet seat look herniated from underneath, and you'll have to belch repeatedly just to break the seal. If you are a guest attempting to sneak a midnight potty break, rest assured that everyone on the whole block knows what you've done. And that's if it actually works. The first two or three times you try it, it just makes hairball noises. Any one of these dreadful traits could be gotten used to, for a permanent resident. But it is the worst possible plumbing fixture for a guest bathroom.

So I was thrilled when Dave assessed the situation and declared that the toilet itself needed to be replaced. "Are you going to go buy a new one today?" I asked. "Nope," he said. "I think I'll just use the one in the basement."

This is an amazing thing. We can't ever find a pencil or a pen or a roll of tape in this house, but here we had an extra toilet just handy by. Not plumbed, mind you. It's just a toilet in the basement, stashed away where a passing drunk won't mistake it for a working item. We picked it up from an office on my mail route, where it was being replaced by a super low-flow one. (Heh.) Just in case we ever needed one.

The Devil Toilet and everything else that went in our house addition was professionally installed by Rob the Plumber. We love Rob. He's an enormous man, in every direction. He's about five thousand pounds, and he's not even fat. All right, he is, but not as fat as you might expect. When we first met him we were much relieved to find him wearing overalls. I'd pop in on him from time to time, checking on progress, until one day he was crouched next to the bathtub wearing sweatpants with the elastic in a state of complete surrender. There's a record of that moment on my retinas to this day. The Colorado River never carved out anything bigger. In retrospect, I believe it was a deliberate customer repulsion tactic. Nobody really likes supervision.

Dave got the basement toilet installed in the guest bath with a minimum of agitation. In a hopeful portent of plumbing to come, it fit against the wall without a micron to spare. I did ask--as delicately as if I were chucking a grizzly under the chin--if I could help in any way, and whereas in a normal household one might be asked to fetch a wrench, or mop up a mess, my specific instructions were to hold off pooping so I could "have one ready in the chamber to inaugurate the new toilet."

So I held off. The urge went away and hasn't come back yet. I'm full of anticipation. I think it's anticipation.

Cow tongues and cow farts

By tradition, we like to spend New Year's Eve with our best friends, who live sixty miles south of us now. This year we thought it would be right festive to rendezvous at our little Forest Service cabin on the slope of Mt. Hood, an hour away. It's at relatively low elevation and doesn't usually get a heap of unmanageable precipitation, but what with all the cow flatulence and car flatulence over the last century, our weather has come up with some fresh ideas. We thought it was best to phone ahead and see how much snow we'd have to slog through before committing ourselves. Great news! The roads were plowed, even our forest service road had had some recent acquaintance with a front-end loader, and our informant guessed we had about six inches of snow on the ground. All systems were Go.

We arrived first and got right up to the beginning of our long driveway, and that was that. There were six inches of snow on the ground, but you had to dig down three or four feet to get to them. Dave commenced shoveling out enough of the driveway to accommodate two pickup trucks, ours and a good one, and I stomped my way to the cabin with provisions. I made a mental note to buy a sled and tow rope, just as I did the last time, but my mental notes are Post-Its in the wind. Every third step or so was crotch deep. It was astoundingly laborious. Fortunately, I had unearthed a snow suit from my closet that hadn't seen service since the eighties. It was rad. The pants were pleated in the front and the jacket had shoulder pads and nothing, at this moment, ever looked finer. We brought three full-size coolers full of food plus a case of beer. Our friends arrived with a matching contribution, plus a case of wine, plus a just-in-case case of wine. (We planned to stay two days, and we are not dainty.) They also brought their German Shepherd puppy, Bear. Guess what he did in the woods?

We were nearly two hours getting everything into the cabin, and we built a fire in the woodstove. (By tradition, there's a power failure, but the electricity came on, so we had to postpone that a day--a memorable evening of candlelight, salami, a nice Cabernet and Jiffy Pop.) Then it was time to turn the water on. By tradition, there is some kind of plumbing disaster, sometimes ghastly enough to send us back home whimpering, so this was a tense moment. We did have to drag out the hair dryer on a long cord and apply it to the spigot, but quite soon the ice chunks began to rattle and the pipes to gurgle and all was well with the world. K. and I had taken up positions in the bathroom to monitor the progress, and sure enough the water was running in the sink there too; we could hardly believe our good fortune, so K. got down on her hands and knees just to make sure nothing was spraying out underneath. That would be the precise point at which the incoming flow blasted out the valve and nailed her with a jet of water with the force of a light saber, pinning her against the far wall like an insect. Dave didn't correctly interpret the bloodcurdling scream so it took another minute to get the water turned off. He and S. spent the next half hour sealing off the cold water tap. That would be by tradition, too.

The woodstove had only gotten the place up to thirty-five degrees, but with all the hauling and what-not it seemed downright balmy to those of us who hadn't been cut nearly in two with a spear of ice water. We filled up the fridge and chiseled out an auxiliary one in the snow outside the front door for the remainder: a cow's tongue, a corned beef brisket, cabbage, bread, ice cream, fruit, potatoes, peppers, pie, cheese, mushrooms, cookies, filberts, pistachios, chips, artichoke dip, pepper bacon, waffle mix, berries, candy, and a stack of butter. The stove continued to crank and the baseboard did its feeble best, and in six hours, we were all just as comfortable as we would have been if we'd never left home. As evening fell, we peered out the window, plump and snug as marmots in a den, contemplating how to put a shine on our winter coats. We started with the brisket.

The four of us reemerged Friday, thicker and glossier, and pawed our way out to the highway. It was sunny, snowy, and rainy, and floods and mudslides were romping all over the road. I blame the cows, and everybody's car but mine.