adventures in manhood

In addition to all my statistics calculations this week, I've been a man's man. I cleaned the garage. I replaced our kitchen faucet, again (the one I installed this spring was faulty, and we had to exchange it for a new one). I changed the spark plugs in Sarah's car. I was a man. The only reason I did these things was because I was avoiding doing the work of a real man: plumbing.

I don't think I mentioned it before, but the toilet in our guest bathroom had become completely detached from the floor about three weeks ago. How did that happen? Sarah really had to go, and there wasn't any stopping her, if you know what I mean. (Okay, I sat on it the day after the big storm and noticed it was loose. Part of the mattress had been resting on it while we were hiding from the hail. Furthermore, as I found out later, the toilet itself had been installed poorly.)

Like with most things, the problem didn't seem like it was going to be that hard to fix. Like with most things, it was hard to fix.

First I tried to work around the mistakes of the previous installation. The unpleasantness began when I was on my hands and knees peering up inside the toilet (which I had emptied and drained about 2 weeks ago). I was trying to line up some new parts on the toilet bowl with the newly exposed sewer pipe. I wanted to get it right, but I also wanted to get out of there quickly. Open sewer pipes aren't particularly pleasant. Sarah was helping me by holding the toilet steady as it rested precariously on it's front edge, tipped slightly so I could see underneath. I held the flashlight in one hand, and I used my other hand to fiddle with the new parts. My face was about an inch from the floor, and I was craning my neck to see what I was doing under there.

That's when a fist-sized ball of compacted poop slid down from it's perch on top of some sort of internal poop-holding shelf, past and against both my hands, and onto the floor next to my face. Plop.

Surprisingly, I didn't feel like vomiting immediately. But as the smell wafted over me and filled the room, some unpleasant thoughts began to collect in my head. "Hmmm... There appears to be more in there. A lot more." "Hmm... I think I'm going to have to clean it up if I'm going to finish." "Hmmm...  there's no telling how long that stuff has been collecting here. Definitely weeks. Maybe months. Maybe years. Maybe some of it isn't even ours." "Oh, the humanity!"

As I scraped it all into a box that had been sitting nearby, I pretty much lost it. Emotionally. Mentally. Physically. Vomitorally.  I can still smell faintly it as I write about it. It happened 4 days ago.

It was a definite turning point in the whole operation. I took the toilet out into the yard, flushed it out with the hose, and let it sit in the 100 degree sun. Then I flushed it out with the hose again. Then I cleaned it. Meanwhile Sarah went to the store and bought bleach. When she got back, she gave all the surfaces in the bathroom a thorough cleaning.

I decided to scrap the attempt to fix the broken parts. I drilled new holes into the concrete foundation and installed a new brass closet flange (the thing that holds the toilet to the floor; the previous owners used a plastic one, and they installed it wrong, hence my current issue). Then I figured out that I could use a pair of washers to fix a design flaw in the new flange. Then I installed the new seals, put the toilet back on, and tried to forget any of it ever happened.

Unfortunately, I will never forget.