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 Dumpling

Why? What does your plunger look like?

My insurance company sent me a card on my birthday, just like Grandma used to do, only instead of having a five-dollar bill in it, it had a home colon screening kit. I sent Grandma a thank-you note every year, but these folks want something different.

It's pretty easy, but you do have to think about it. Weeks can pass by when you do what you're used to doing and then go, oh crap. I forgot to do the kit again. And it's a little problematic because most of the time when I'm on the toilet all kinds of things can happen. Well not all kinds, but one thing or the other. And in this case, you don't want the One thing, you just want the Other thing.

But finally I remembered to get out the kit at just the right time, at the E.T.A. of the B.M., and I unfolded the tissue paper and laid it neatly on the water surface, and everything was going just fine. Then you get the little twiddle stick and twiddle it in your Issue Of The Residuum, pack it away, and mail it off. It's a tiny twiddler. It looks like a toothbrush for a shrew. You only have the one shot at it, but I had a lot to work with, so I picked a particularly nice spot to twiddle. You don't want to be sending off a corn kernel on a stick.

I packed off my nice sample, fine of texture and hue, and then I cleaned up per usual and gave 'er a flush.

I will pause here to note that I have never plugged up the toilet I use regularly, as it were. My toilet and I are on the same page. Other people have plugged up the toilet. Or more often they make it run on and on. We have a toilet with a little handle in the center of the tank. I thought it was adorable when we picked it out but it has its drawbacks. You are supposed to pull it up gently, but for some reason guests like to reef on it like they're starting up a lawn mower, and then the little chain gets overexcited and bunches up, and the toilet runs on and on. And because you can't just take the tank lid all the way off, because the chain is attached to it, you have to try to fix it blind with your arm jammed under the lid.

But I have never plugged up my toilet. Until now.

I flushed gently, and watched the perfectly centered tissue paper fold up neatly around my production like a Chinese bao--oh, let's go ahead and call it a Dumpling--and wedge itself in the go-away hole. And there it sat, a big toilet bolus. It wasn't awful to look at or anything--it was very neatly wrapped indeed. A bow wouldn't have been at all out of place.

I've certainly plugged up a toilet before. Not mine. Notably, I once visited a world of hurt on the spotless bathroom belonging to an obsessively tidy gentleman who threw himself off a bridge shortly after the incident, and I'm not even kidding. But my record with my own toilet is clean. So this was a situation. Several flushes served only to send the water level to the uh-oh zone. I was not at all inclined to sacrifice a barbecue fork, although I believe a simple perforation would have done the trick. Finally I annoyed the bolus with a plunger and it slipped the swirly bonds. No harm done.

But I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the tidy dead gentleman, and I'm sorry to have handed my mailman a biohazard, and I'm sorry to have stressed out my toilet. Really, I should apologize to my toilet every day. It was such a champ during my last actual colonoscopy prep. I'm not a bit sorry about anything that might have happened during my colonoscopy. Those people had it coming.