moral: whining will get you a new toilet

So I can't BELIEVE that I forgot to tell you all this: remember last week when I was all I have TOO MUCH TIME ON MY HANDS, whatever will I DO with myself, wah wah wah and you guys were all teach a class! volunteer! yay for you! (which I totally appreciated, by the way)--remember that?

Yeah.

I wrote that post, hit PUBLISH, and got ready to leave the house to finish running my pre-Girl's Weekend errands (bank, post office, Gap for long-sleeved tee shirts--is it just me or does packing for a Casual Weekend inevitably turn into a trip to the mall for Things I'm Sure I Will Want To Wear But Don't Own for you, too? please say it's not just me). I brushed my teeth, put on my shoes, and stepped into the boys' bathroom for a Kleenex.

And found myself standing in a puddle of water. A PUDDLE OF WATER! Holy hell.


Imagine the floor COVERED with water! From the toilet! Because I was too busy swearing to take actual pictures.

I said a few choice swear words, grabbed some towels, and started mopping. The toilet was leaking from the part where the tank screws onto the seat (I'm sure there's a Fancy Name for it, but I was just calling it the--well, never mind. That's where the leak was). I stuck a pitcher under the leak (what? you don't keep a plastic pitcher in your bathroom? how do you fill the humidifiers up?) and said a few more swear words and went to call the plumber.

When the office manager answered the phone, I said, "I HAVE A LEAKING TOILET AND I AM TOTALLY LEAVING TOWN TOMORROW AND CAN YOU PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SEND SOMEONE OUT HERE RIGHT NOW? PLEASE?!?! BECAUSE THE TOILET! IS LEAKING! EVERYWHERE! AND I'M GOING OUT OF TOWN!" Yes, she said, she absolutely could; her guys were finishing a job and were going to get some lunch and then would be right over.

So I stopped yelling and started assessing the leak because she was asking me all kinds of questions like, "Is the toilet overflowing?" (answer: thankfully, no) and "Will it flush?" (answer: I don't know and I'm not finding out). And as I was assessing, I realized that HOLY HELL the toilet is ALSO leaking from UNDERNEATH! Like where it meets the FLOOR! Oh my god! And dammit! When I relayed this to the office manager, she tells me that the problem is most likely one of two things: my "stool" needs to be reset (dear god, please DO NOT call it a "stool") or--OR!--my sewer line is backed up and will need to be, er, unbacked up, something like that. "Is the tub draining slowly?" she asked me.

"Well, you know, no more slowly than usual," I tell her, remembering in perfect detail a conversation Wade and I have had a couple of times recently about how damn SLOW the drain on that tub is.

"Is there raw sewage backing up into the bathtub?" she asks me.

"OH MY GOD NO!" I said.

"Then that's good."

You THINK?

Anyway, she gets the plumbers set to come out to the house, and I spend the next hour FREAKING OUT because OH MY GOD I will have to go to Kansas City WITHOUT a long sleeved brown tee shirt and I'm CERTAIN that it's my sewer line and what am I supposed to PACK and thank god this happened TODAY and not TOMORROW when Wade was at work or the ENTIRE HALLWAY would have been flooded!


We have lovely parquet flooring! Home buyers love parquet flooring!

(Later, my mother reminded me that I could have turned the water off, and when I started to say, sure, but we don't have the special key for the water main outside, she said, "No, in the bathroom. You could have turned the water to the TOILET off." Why yes, I suppose I could have. If I had thought of it. Which I didn't. Because I was too worried about what to wear to meet People From the Internet.)

Wade called while I was freaking out about my tee shirts waiting for the plumber and I said, "Guess what I'm doing!"

And he said, "Painting the bathroom?" And then he started to laugh because ha ha ha I'm always saying "I'm going to PAINT the BATHROOM! This week! Really!"

I said, "No, but I am IMPROVING the bathroom!" Because stopping the leak seemed like a huge improvement.

The plumbers finally finished their lunch and came to look at my toilet. They went in the bathroom to check things out, and I could hear them laughing and saying things like, "HOLY CRAP! Look at THAT!" and "I've never seen ANYTHING like THAT before!" Which was a real confidence builder.

In the end, the deal was this: the bolts on the toilet--the ones that screw the tank to the seat AND the ones that screw the seat to the floor--had ALL rusted out at the EXACT SAME MOMENT (I know! what are the odds?), causing the toilet to leak everywhere. I would need new bolts and new flaps and I should also have a new somthingInevercaughtthenameof and I said, FINE FINE! fix it all! and they headed out to the plumbing store.

And twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was the office manager; the plumbers (Charlie was impressed that we needed TWO plumbers this time) had gone THREE places looking for replacement parts for my toilet; the office manager had called FOUR other places, looking for the same parts. No go. I was going to have to have a new toilet.

Whatever. At least it wasn't a new sewer line.


Charlie was home for exactly thirty seconds before he decided he had to poop. So much for the pristine new toilet.

And never again will you hear me complain about needing more to do with my time. Because I'm totally going to paint that bathroom. This week! Really.