Hugging the Bowl

    I've been hugging a toilet bowl, on and off, for two days. No, I haven't been sick, or drinking.
    Let's say your toilet was leaking underneath; it was dripping through the floor and making a puddle in your basement, and you wanted to fix it. You would have to disconnect things, take off the tank, unbolt the contraption from the floor, and at some point you would have to lift it up to move it off the spot. Have you ever tried to lift a toilet bowl? It's damned awkward, actually: you have to sort of hug it. Now you're getting the idea.
    When you're putting it back again, having settled it carefully on its wax seal after getting the wobbling bolts to go through their little holes without falling over underneath, you also don't want to over-tighten the nuts because the porcelain is very brittle. I knew this, but even so, as I was carefully snugging down the nuts the first time, I felt a sickening feeling as I turned the wrench; a sudden slackness. It wasn't the porcelain cracking: it was the flange on the ancient cast iron pipe underneath, crumbling away. The bolt was free as a bird.
    I was strangely calm. Well, I did swear a blue streak, with a rising note of hysteria in my voice that was a little frightening, but if there's no one there to hear you, did you actually make a sound? But then I thought, I can take a piece of steel bar stock, and with a hacksaw and files, I can make a flange to fit under what's left of the broken cast iron rim of the pipe. So that's what I did, and it worked; it took me about 2 hours. But I must mention: in the meanwhile, since you've lifted and moved the toilet away from its place, there is the dreadful menacing 4 inch hole in the floor; the pipe that goes straight down into the netherworld of the septic tank far below. This hole was just inviting me, for instance, to fumble and drop a tool down it; never to be seen again, or something worse. Your instinct bids you to cover that hole, so I did; I cut a plastic cover out of an old piece of tupperware, and I used it to seal the hideous hole while I was working on the broken flange.
    Now, before I relate how I came to install the toilet bowl not one more time, but two more times, I will mention another good reason for keeping the pipe covered while you are working: septage flies. These interesting creatures actually live in the fetid subterranean darkness of the septic tank, flying around above the liquid in the underground chamber, and communicating with the outside world via the vent pipe on the house roof. And you thought you had a bad job. Perhaps you can understand that I didn't want any of these little denizens of the dark to visit me in my world. And in fact, as I worked, I would occasionally see one of these small flies flying around under the cover for a few moments, perhaps contemplating the wondrous light that he could see through the translucent plastic.
    When I was done making the new flange, I reformed the squashed wax seal around the hole in the bottom of the toilet, buttering it around with a putty knife, like frosting a cake. When I was satisfied that the wax ring was well formed and would seat properly, I carefully lowered the toilet bowl down over the hole for the second time, getting the bolts to go through their holes without knocking them over. It took a couple of tries, but I got it done, and I felt the satisfying "give" of the wax spreading out and sealing the joint. A perfect job, and I would be very careful tightening down the nuts this time. But something was nagging at the back of my mind. Think carefully, I told myself; is everything shipshape? It ought to be, but think...
    NO! That's right; maybe you guessed it: the tupperware cover was still in its place down under there! Not as perfect a job as I could have wished. One more time, I get to bend my back to this fascinating job, and hug the toilet bowl. Off it comes again, and although it's too late now to make a long story short, I finally made an end of it, and as of this writing, there's no more puddle under the pipes in the basement.


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Grammar Test

When I was in grade school, we would get questions like the following:

- Correct the error(s) in the following sentence -
"Jack seen Fred fix them cars hisself."

    I would always think, who could ever get these questions wrong?  Everyone knows where Fred ain't smart enough to fix no car by hisself!