OK, my friend Suldog has done it again. A while back, he posted about HIS WIFE'S accidental misadventure (at least, he presented it as accidental, and I have no reason to doubt him) with a public restroom. Which, as Suldog's posts often seem to do, called forth a couple of stories from my own young life, which I left in his comment-space, but later decided that they would work just fine for taking up some space in my own humble blog. You all can tell me whether or not I assessed their quality accurately. . .
-------------------------
Many years ago, Jen and I were at the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, held every Labor Day, in which a couple lanes of the majestic bridge joining Michigan's peninsulas are given over for a few hours, so that Michiganders (or, really, anybody who shows up) can walk the 5-mile span. Something like 50,000 people do the bridge walk every year, proceeding from north (St. Ignace) to south (Mackinaw City). Bridge-walkers can park their cars at either end of the bridge, but south-to-north bus transport will be required, either to take you from your car on the south end to the beginning of the walk, or from the end of the walk to your car on the north end. Michiganders have learned, from 50+ years' experience, that, if you are in the UP on Labor Day, and want to drive south, you either cross the bridge before the sun rises, or you wait until later in the day.
So we walked the bridge, and we had a great time. There is something fairly awesome about walking across a five-mile expanse of open water, with its views of Michigan's two peninsulas, and Mackinac Island (which is probably my favorite place in all the earth). And it is not unusual for a freighter to pass under the bridge, and thus, beneath the walkers' feet, in the course of the hour-plus it takes to complete the walk. At the highest point of the bridge, the walker is more than 200 feet above the water (and the center lanes of the suspension portion of the bridge are decked with an open steel grid, for aerodynamic reasons; if a walker suffers from vertigo or acrophobia, he is well-advised to keep to the solidly-paved outer lane)
Anyway, with so many walkers, the, uh, need for toilet facilities is particularly acute, given that the normal population of Mackinaw City is a bit under1000 souls (altho, during the summer tourist season, the town is considerably more crowded than that). One of the years I went, I got to the end of the walk and really had to go. There were something like 50 porta-johns lined up in an open field near where the buses were lined up to take us back to the north end of the bridge, where our cars were parked. Half of 'em were labeled 'MEN' and the other half 'WOMEN'. For some odd reason, there were long lines at all the 'MEN's' porta-johns, but none at all at the 'WOMEN's' (which, I think, is the absolute only time I've ever seen that, but that's how it was).
I was somewhere around 20th in line, crossing my legs and urging the lines to move faster, when the thought slowly crept from the deep recesses of my brain to the level of outward conscious thought - 'Waaaaiiiiit a miniiiiitttt. . . only one person at a time can use a porta-john. . . They don't need to mark 'em for MEN and WOMEN at all. . ." Evidently, the exact same thought percolated to the front of several other men's minds virtually simultaneously, because several of us together wandered over to the WOMEN's porta-johns and quickly availed ourselves of their amenities. By the time I emerged a minute or two later, having finished my business, and being considerably more relieved than when I'd gone in, the 'MEN' and 'WOMEN' signs had all been taken down, and all the porta-johns had lines, half as long as the previous ones, and, uh, urinary throughput was doubled. . .
-------------------------
Another time, I was at a conference at a small liberal-arts college in Michigan. During a break between sessions, I made use of the restroom facilities. The urinals (ladies, if you really don't know what 'urinals' are. . . uh, ask your brother, or something) were of an odd type that I hadn't seen before - sort of a 'pedestal' design, away from the wall, that required the, uh, user to sorta split his legs on either side of the, uh, receptacle, in order to 'do his business'. Afterward, I was commenting on the uniquely-configured urinals to one of the other (male) conferees, when an employee of the college, standing nearby, overheard us.
"Oh, that is quite intentional," he informed us. "They're unisex urinals." I invested a few seconds' thought toward how that might work if I were, you know, an actual woman (and it seemed to me that, in actual usage, it might not work quite as, um, cleanly as what the designer originally thought it would) (I should also mention here that I never wandered into the women's restroom to see if they had also been installed there). Then I quickly shook my head to clear the image from my brain.
Only, you know, at a college (probably the same folks who dream up stuff like this). . .
Showing posts with label toilet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toilet. Show all posts
Monday, July 11, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
A Lenten Miscellany
OK, by way of setting the scene for the story I'm about to tell, I need to tell you that, in our community, we have a small 'brotherhood' of celibate men, who function as a kind of 'monastic order'. Their 'unencumbered-ness' frees them to do all kinds of, um, radical service that those of us of a more married persuasion could simply never hope to do. They are, pretty much without exception, great guys, and a great blessing to the life of our community (Jen wants all of our sons to at least spend some time living with the 'brotherhood'; even if they never embrace the brotherhood life as their own, she thinks it will make them better husbands; always thinking ahead, my wife).
Now, 2F, with her Child Development training, is much intrigued by the Myers-Briggs personality index (and heck, who isn't?) (although I get a little impatient with some of the M-B 'true believers' who want to put people into little 'boxes'; but I digress), with its 'four dichotomies' of Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/iNtuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. She has identified herself as ENFP (I'm INTP, for what it's worth; I think Jen is ESTJ, which is pretty close to my polar opposite; which might explain why we form such a good team - between the two of us, we've got pretty much all the bases covered).
2F has a friend - a young man, who is in the early stages of investigating a commitment to the 'brotherhood' I mentioned above (and thus, he is absolutely a friend and a brother to her; not, at least at this point, a potential suitor). The two of them share an interest in Myers-Briggs, as well as being of the same type - ENFP. The two of them were talking recently, and the young man mentioned that, as he spent more time around the 'brotherhood' guys, he perceived a subtle shift in his personality, to more of an ENFJ type.
"Oh," said 2F, "I would mourn the loss of your P-ness."
(*awkward silence*)
(*really REALLY awkward silence*)
"Good grief," he finally replied, as 2F turned 29 shades of mortified red, "I'm only talking about a subtle shift in my personality; I'm not surrendering my manhood. . ."
*************************
And now for something completely different (and aren't you glad it is?). . .
In our house, we have three toilets (OK, are you still sure you're happy about the change of topic?). Two of them are of the newer, government-mandated low-volume type (and the third is in the farthest corner of the basement, so it's not real convenient of access; especially if the, uh, need is particularly urgent) (and honestly? What the heck is the government's 'compelling interest' in the size of my toilet tank? I've given some (not at all serious) thought to starting a smuggling business running black-market toilets from Canada; but I digress. . .).
Of the two 'low-volume' cans we have in our house, one is a newer design that is actually pretty effective at accomplishing its task. The other one, however. . . not so much. In that bathroom, a second flush is not at all unusual, and the plunger, which is kept ready right next to the tank, is a well-used item.
Recently, that toilet had a particularly, um, stubborn clog. One which didn't readily respond to the application of the plunger. Time and time again, I plunged away at the bottom of the bowl, and the water line didn't budge. So I plunged more vigorously, which did lower the line a little bit, but that was because I was plunging so aggressively that the water was splashing onto the floor (and I was in my sock-feet; which just made the whole experience that much more, uh, 'special').
I got Jen to call around to see if anyone we knew had a plumbing 'snake' we could borrow, because this clog was simply not gonna budge. Finally, when she was on her third or fourth phone call, I heard the telltale gurgle, followed by the 'swoosh' of the water draining out of the bowl. Hallelujah. I went to wash my hands, and I saw this result of my very dedicated and vigorous plunging:
And I wondered if I should show it to my priest, in case my cause for sainthood ever comes up. The Wounds of Christ, and all that. . . (Or, you know, maybe I'm just showing you, on my handy pocket map of Michigan, where I live. . .)
And then I thought of some of the, uh, 'colorful' words I had uttered in the course of acquiring said wounds. And I thought about the investigator from the Vatican (whatever it is that they call him) going over the paperwork, wondering to himself, 'he got the Wounds of Christ from plunging a toilet?' . . .
So yeah, OK. . . probably not. . .
*************************
This bit should probably be a separate post, but I'm kinda lazy that way. . .
-------------------------
Jen and I spent four days last week in Detroit, on a kind of mini-mission-trip, right here in our home state. It is certainly no secret that Detroit has been in a bad way for the past 50 years and more. I am just old enough to remember when Detroit was a vibrant, bustling city (our family lived in the Detroit suburbs for all but one of my first seven years), but even by the 60s, the downhill trend was getting noticeable (especially after the riot in '67), and by the 70s, the bottom had fallen out.
Part of our time there included a tour of the city, along with a historical account of how things got to where they are now. I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that one of our tour guides said (very insightfully I thought) that it essentially boiled down to a loss of natural human community - people became disconnected from their neighbors - and what you see is basically what you get when people stop giving a shit.
I think a detailed account of what-all we did would get pretty tedious. I'll mention that we spent the largest part of our time doing cleaning and painting on a couple houses in the process of being restored. But the things that will stick in my mind are mostly an impressionistic hodge-podge of seemingly random, disconnected vignettes. In no particular order. . .
- When we arrived, before we even knew where we'd be sleeping, or unloaded our bags from the car, we were taken to work with a gutsy little nun, who takes sack lunches to homeless folks ("put lots of peanut butter on the sandwiches," she told us; "this is probably the only meal most of these folks will have today."). She'd just drive up to a vacant lot, or abandoned house, and honk the horn on her minivan, and half-a-dozen folks would appear, almost eerily, out of the shadows. They would invariably smile and be happy to see Sister, and greet her 'helpers' (ie, us) cheerily. Some would ask us to pray for them for some need or other; many inquired after Sister's well-being, which made me smile - they were the homeless ones, after all. One time, we drove up to a vacant block - all the houses on the block had been torn down - with only a pile of junk in the middle of the block; sister tooted her horn, and three people appeared out of the pile of junk.
- We visited a bakery which functions as a kind-of 'bridge' for ex-cons to make their way into 'regular life' - keeping a schedule, showing up on time for work, being responsible, stuff like that - usually for the first time in their life. We met a man who had spent a few years in prison, who told us a harrowing story of miraculous survival of taking multiple point-blank gunshots which, in the fullness of time, led him to the conviction that what he'd been doing wasn't working, and maybe he ought to get to know the Author of his miracle a little better. He also made some really excellent oatmeal-raisin cookies.
- We met an energetic, visionary young pastor who, if there were twenty others like him, might yet revive Detroit in my lifetime.
- We saw one of the 'best' neighborhoods in the city - maybe three blocks by eight blocks of homes which, were they not in Detroit, would be worth well over a million dollars. And we drove along the street which separated that neighborhood from the vacant lots and burned-out houses on the next block. And all the 'nice' houses had eight-foot privacy fences at the back edge of their yards, so they wouldn't have to look at (or think about?) the poverty next door. . .
- The site of old Tiger Stadium was just a half-mile or so up the street from where we spent quite a bit of our time, so we passed by it a few times (if you knew what you were looking for, it flashed by in the Eminem Chrysler commercial that aired during the Super Bowl). The stadium is completely gone now; all that remains is a section of ornate fencing along what used to be the first-base line, and the center-field flagpole. It was just incredibly sad to me that the stadium where Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline played, where Sparky Anderson managed, and Ernie Harwell broadcast their games, where the Tigers played in nine World Series, and won four, is just another dirt-covered vacant block in Detroit now; yet another instance of nobody giving enough of a shit to do anything more. . .
- We also spent a bit of time on our tour at the old Michigan Central train station. In its day, it was one of the most beautiful train stations in the country. When it closed 23 years ago, it took six months for it to be reduced to a massive standing testimony of urban blight. First the outlaw scrappers came in and pulled all the copper and iron pipes out of the building, as well as the marble. The vandals followed, breaking all the windows (it just seemed gratuitous that all the windows were broken, all the way up to the 20th floor) and covering the interior with grafitti. Then the homeless squatters moved in, and burned out what was left of the interior (it's hard for me to blame them much; mainly, they were just trying to keep warm in the winter, burning whatever they could find at hand). So now you've got a huge burned-out hulk with 20 stories of broken windows, visible from pretty much anywhere in the city. Terribly, terribly sad. . .
- We walked through the Heidelberg Project, a famous bit of delightfully bizarre 'trash art' encompassing a full city block. . .
- We spent half a day working at the Capuchin soup kitchen founded by Fr. Solanus Casey, including attending an AA meeting with some of the most brutally-honest people I have ever encountered. . .
-------------------------
Now the thing for Jen and me is to figure out what to do with this experience. If all we do is fly in for four days of do-gooding, then fly back out, and that's the extent of it, that would strike me as really lame, and a massive missing of the point. Something more seems to be called out from us, some deeper degree of human solidarity. The folks we worked with became, in whatever limited degree, our friends, and friendships (at least mine) are not meant for four-days-and-out. We need to figure out some way to be 'with' our friends in Detroit, in some kind of ongoing way. And as I sit here, I really don't know quite what form that will end up taking; but I'm pretty sure it won't be nothing at all. . .
(As a postscript, I'll mention that our program was run by Youthworks Detroit. If any of you are just itching for an opportunity to do some mission-type work in Detroit, or even just want to make a contribution to their work, give 'em a look; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. . .)
Now, 2F, with her Child Development training, is much intrigued by the Myers-Briggs personality index (and heck, who isn't?) (although I get a little impatient with some of the M-B 'true believers' who want to put people into little 'boxes'; but I digress), with its 'four dichotomies' of Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/iNtuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. She has identified herself as ENFP (I'm INTP, for what it's worth; I think Jen is ESTJ, which is pretty close to my polar opposite; which might explain why we form such a good team - between the two of us, we've got pretty much all the bases covered).
2F has a friend - a young man, who is in the early stages of investigating a commitment to the 'brotherhood' I mentioned above (and thus, he is absolutely a friend and a brother to her; not, at least at this point, a potential suitor). The two of them share an interest in Myers-Briggs, as well as being of the same type - ENFP. The two of them were talking recently, and the young man mentioned that, as he spent more time around the 'brotherhood' guys, he perceived a subtle shift in his personality, to more of an ENFJ type.
"Oh," said 2F, "I would mourn the loss of your P-ness."
(*awkward silence*)
(*really REALLY awkward silence*)
"Good grief," he finally replied, as 2F turned 29 shades of mortified red, "I'm only talking about a subtle shift in my personality; I'm not surrendering my manhood. . ."
*************************
And now for something completely different (and aren't you glad it is?). . .
In our house, we have three toilets (OK, are you still sure you're happy about the change of topic?). Two of them are of the newer, government-mandated low-volume type (and the third is in the farthest corner of the basement, so it's not real convenient of access; especially if the, uh, need is particularly urgent) (and honestly? What the heck is the government's 'compelling interest' in the size of my toilet tank? I've given some (not at all serious) thought to starting a smuggling business running black-market toilets from Canada; but I digress. . .).
Of the two 'low-volume' cans we have in our house, one is a newer design that is actually pretty effective at accomplishing its task. The other one, however. . . not so much. In that bathroom, a second flush is not at all unusual, and the plunger, which is kept ready right next to the tank, is a well-used item.
Recently, that toilet had a particularly, um, stubborn clog. One which didn't readily respond to the application of the plunger. Time and time again, I plunged away at the bottom of the bowl, and the water line didn't budge. So I plunged more vigorously, which did lower the line a little bit, but that was because I was plunging so aggressively that the water was splashing onto the floor (and I was in my sock-feet; which just made the whole experience that much more, uh, 'special').
I got Jen to call around to see if anyone we knew had a plumbing 'snake' we could borrow, because this clog was simply not gonna budge. Finally, when she was on her third or fourth phone call, I heard the telltale gurgle, followed by the 'swoosh' of the water draining out of the bowl. Hallelujah. I went to wash my hands, and I saw this result of my very dedicated and vigorous plunging:
And I wondered if I should show it to my priest, in case my cause for sainthood ever comes up. The Wounds of Christ, and all that. . . (Or, you know, maybe I'm just showing you, on my handy pocket map of Michigan, where I live. . .)
And then I thought of some of the, uh, 'colorful' words I had uttered in the course of acquiring said wounds. And I thought about the investigator from the Vatican (whatever it is that they call him) going over the paperwork, wondering to himself, 'he got the Wounds of Christ from plunging a toilet?' . . .
So yeah, OK. . . probably not. . .
*************************
This bit should probably be a separate post, but I'm kinda lazy that way. . .
-------------------------
Jen and I spent four days last week in Detroit, on a kind of mini-mission-trip, right here in our home state. It is certainly no secret that Detroit has been in a bad way for the past 50 years and more. I am just old enough to remember when Detroit was a vibrant, bustling city (our family lived in the Detroit suburbs for all but one of my first seven years), but even by the 60s, the downhill trend was getting noticeable (especially after the riot in '67), and by the 70s, the bottom had fallen out.
Part of our time there included a tour of the city, along with a historical account of how things got to where they are now. I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that one of our tour guides said (very insightfully I thought) that it essentially boiled down to a loss of natural human community - people became disconnected from their neighbors - and what you see is basically what you get when people stop giving a shit.
I think a detailed account of what-all we did would get pretty tedious. I'll mention that we spent the largest part of our time doing cleaning and painting on a couple houses in the process of being restored. But the things that will stick in my mind are mostly an impressionistic hodge-podge of seemingly random, disconnected vignettes. In no particular order. . .
- When we arrived, before we even knew where we'd be sleeping, or unloaded our bags from the car, we were taken to work with a gutsy little nun, who takes sack lunches to homeless folks ("put lots of peanut butter on the sandwiches," she told us; "this is probably the only meal most of these folks will have today."). She'd just drive up to a vacant lot, or abandoned house, and honk the horn on her minivan, and half-a-dozen folks would appear, almost eerily, out of the shadows. They would invariably smile and be happy to see Sister, and greet her 'helpers' (ie, us) cheerily. Some would ask us to pray for them for some need or other; many inquired after Sister's well-being, which made me smile - they were the homeless ones, after all. One time, we drove up to a vacant block - all the houses on the block had been torn down - with only a pile of junk in the middle of the block; sister tooted her horn, and three people appeared out of the pile of junk.
- We visited a bakery which functions as a kind-of 'bridge' for ex-cons to make their way into 'regular life' - keeping a schedule, showing up on time for work, being responsible, stuff like that - usually for the first time in their life. We met a man who had spent a few years in prison, who told us a harrowing story of miraculous survival of taking multiple point-blank gunshots which, in the fullness of time, led him to the conviction that what he'd been doing wasn't working, and maybe he ought to get to know the Author of his miracle a little better. He also made some really excellent oatmeal-raisin cookies.
- We met an energetic, visionary young pastor who, if there were twenty others like him, might yet revive Detroit in my lifetime.
- We saw one of the 'best' neighborhoods in the city - maybe three blocks by eight blocks of homes which, were they not in Detroit, would be worth well over a million dollars. And we drove along the street which separated that neighborhood from the vacant lots and burned-out houses on the next block. And all the 'nice' houses had eight-foot privacy fences at the back edge of their yards, so they wouldn't have to look at (or think about?) the poverty next door. . .
- The site of old Tiger Stadium was just a half-mile or so up the street from where we spent quite a bit of our time, so we passed by it a few times (if you knew what you were looking for, it flashed by in the Eminem Chrysler commercial that aired during the Super Bowl). The stadium is completely gone now; all that remains is a section of ornate fencing along what used to be the first-base line, and the center-field flagpole. It was just incredibly sad to me that the stadium where Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline played, where Sparky Anderson managed, and Ernie Harwell broadcast their games, where the Tigers played in nine World Series, and won four, is just another dirt-covered vacant block in Detroit now; yet another instance of nobody giving enough of a shit to do anything more. . .
- We also spent a bit of time on our tour at the old Michigan Central train station. In its day, it was one of the most beautiful train stations in the country. When it closed 23 years ago, it took six months for it to be reduced to a massive standing testimony of urban blight. First the outlaw scrappers came in and pulled all the copper and iron pipes out of the building, as well as the marble. The vandals followed, breaking all the windows (it just seemed gratuitous that all the windows were broken, all the way up to the 20th floor) and covering the interior with grafitti. Then the homeless squatters moved in, and burned out what was left of the interior (it's hard for me to blame them much; mainly, they were just trying to keep warm in the winter, burning whatever they could find at hand). So now you've got a huge burned-out hulk with 20 stories of broken windows, visible from pretty much anywhere in the city. Terribly, terribly sad. . .
- We walked through the Heidelberg Project, a famous bit of delightfully bizarre 'trash art' encompassing a full city block. . .
- We spent half a day working at the Capuchin soup kitchen founded by Fr. Solanus Casey, including attending an AA meeting with some of the most brutally-honest people I have ever encountered. . .
-------------------------
Now the thing for Jen and me is to figure out what to do with this experience. If all we do is fly in for four days of do-gooding, then fly back out, and that's the extent of it, that would strike me as really lame, and a massive missing of the point. Something more seems to be called out from us, some deeper degree of human solidarity. The folks we worked with became, in whatever limited degree, our friends, and friendships (at least mine) are not meant for four-days-and-out. We need to figure out some way to be 'with' our friends in Detroit, in some kind of ongoing way. And as I sit here, I really don't know quite what form that will end up taking; but I'm pretty sure it won't be nothing at all. . .
(As a postscript, I'll mention that our program was run by Youthworks Detroit. If any of you are just itching for an opportunity to do some mission-type work in Detroit, or even just want to make a contribution to their work, give 'em a look; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. . .)
Monday, September 13, 2010
Canning and The Can
OK, I've been debating with myself for a while whether to post this bit or not. But my friend Lime went ahead and posted (a while back, by now) about a long-ago bathroom remodeling, and it poked my brain for this story, which I hope you'll find at least mildly entertaining. . .
-------------------------
In my young life, I've installed and/or reseated something on the order of half a dozen toilets. Really, it's not terribly difficult, if you've already got a working flange in place - you just have to undo a couple nuts around the base, and disconnect the water supply to the tank, then put down a wax gasket, reseat the toilet, hook everything back up, and you're good to go. I did my first one under my dad's supervision, one Christmas break when I was in college.
Since I've been a homeowner, I've done a few more on my own behalf. With eight kids, it's not unheard-of for miscellaneous sundry toys to end up lodged within the bowels (HAH!) of the toilet. On multiple occasions, I've had to fish various action figures out of the toilet. One or two of my kids have virtually taken on research projects investigating the toilet-clogging properties of various toys. . .
I love all of my children. But their toys, stuck inside the toilet? Not so much. I have to say, though, that by the sixth time or so that you have to unseat and reseat the toilet, in order to dislodge He-Man from the porcelain innards, it's not quite so daunting as the first couple were. . .
-------------------------
The nastiest toilet job I ever had to do, though, had nothing to do with any of the kids. In fact, for quite a while, I had no idea what was going on.
Out of the blue, with no apparent rhyme or reason, our toilet developed an intermittent clog. It would flush just fine for several days, and then, without warning, it would be completely plugged. Not slow, or struggling to flush - when the lever was pushed, the bowl would instantly fill to overflowing, as though no water at all was going down the drain. Which, as you might imagine, made for some fairly exciting times in our bathroom; you never quite knew when The Clog would strike, causing frantic screams to emanate from behind the bathroom door.
I rigged up a poor-man's toilet snake out of a coat-hanger, and that usually did the trick, inducing the toilet to drain, to the relief of everyone involved (except the person who ended up having to mop up the floor, which sometimes was, um, chunkier than others. . .) And, often as not, a Clog Episode would be followed by several days of normal operation, which would lull us into a false sense of normalcy, until the next Clog struck.
-------------------------
The day inevitably came when none of the unclogging magic worked. The toilet overflowed, the bathroom floor flooded, I poked at the drain with my coat-hanger-snake, and nothing changed. By this time, we'd been living with the unpredictability of The Clog for a while, and the experience was getting old. Given that The Clog wasn't playing nice this time, I resignedly shrugged my shoulders and figured it was finally time to deal with this thing once and for all. I ran out to the hardware store and picked up a new wax gasket, and also a valve to replace the simple angle connector between the main house supply and the supply tube to the toilet tank (plumbing jobs are so much easier with local shutoffs).
After hand-emptying the toilet bowl (I have no comment on the 'chunkiness' of the contents), I disconnected the supply tube, unscrewed the nuts holding the base to the floor, and lifted the toilet off the floor. I took it out to the back yard, where I could use the garden hose to get some liquid 'throughput' going. First, though, I turned it upside down and poked at the drain tube from the bottom, to see if I could determine what was going on any better from the opposite end. I heard a metallic *tink* from inside the toilet.
Well, that was different; maybe now we were making some progress. I poked at it some more with my hanger-snake; I kept getting the odd metallic *tink*, but nothing came out. I detached the tank from the bowl, so I could more easily flip the bowl around to try different angles. Finally, I turned on the outdoor faucet and ran the garden hose through the drain tube. I heard a little rattling noise, and a shiny golden object fell out of the bowl.
It was a large-mouth canning lid.
Suddenly I understood. The canning lid had gotten wedged at the tight corner in the porcelain drain tube, and acted as a kind of random butterfly valve. Sometimes, it would be 'open', and the bowl contents could flow past it virtually as if it weren't there. Sometimes, soggy toilet paper would catch on it, and things would clog up and run slowly, until the soggy paper broke up and got washed down the drain. But if the lid turned sideways, across the drain tube, nothing at all would go down, and the bowl would rapidly fill to overflowing.
I grabbed up the damning evidence and took it in the house, asking Jen if she had any idea how a canning lid would've gotten lodged inside the toilet. Instantly, her eyes got as big as saucers. She related a story of how, a few weeks previously, she'd retrieved a quart of home-canned peaches from the pantry, that had gone bad, so she'd just dumped them down the toilet. She vaguely remembered, since the topic had come up, hearing a small metallic noise as she'd dumped the contents of the jar, but she hadn't thought any more of it, figuring that, if she'd dumped the lid, it would just go down the drain anyway.
Which, obviously, it hadn't.
I sighed heavily. At least the mystery had been solved. And all that remained was to put the toilet back together, and all would be well.
I took the bowl and tank back into the bathroom. I placed the wax gasket on the flange, seated the bowl onto it, and bolted the base to the flange. Next, I situated the tank on the back of the bowl, with the rubber seal in between. I inserted the bolts that held the tank to the bowl flange, and finger-tightened them. Then I got my wrench and screwdriver and tightened the flange bolts more securely. The tank was still pretty floppy and wobbly on the back of the bowl, so I went to tighten the bolts a bit more. Then. . .
*POP!*
I didn't know what had popped, but I was pretty sure that there weren't supposed to be any POP! noises at that stage of the process, and whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn't good. A second later, a chunk of the porcelain flange from the bowl, through which the flange bolt attached the tank to the base, fell to the ground.
I stared at it with stupefied horror, knowing exactly what this meant - I had just, through my own overzealous ignorant stupidity, broken the toilet flange, rendering the entire toilet useless. For a minute or two, I just stared at it, with my mouth agape. Finally, I made my comment.
"SHIIIITTTT!"
(Well, you know, I was working on a toilet. . .)
Truthfully, I didn't have much time to wallow in my self-loathing - it was getting late, and if I was going to procure a new toilet, I needed to hurry. The guy at the plumbing-supply store was very compassionate, and allowed as to how most every do-it-yourself plumber he knew had popped a porcelain flange at some point.
I got the new toilet home (requiring the third wax gasket that I'd seen that day), got it seated and hooked up, and finally all was well. (Well, to get 'technical' for just a second, the new toilet had a different 'setback' than the old one had, so I wound up with a gap of a couple inches between the tank and the wall, which, in the fullness of time required me to build a little 'support bracket' between the tank and the wall. But, at least we had a functioning toilet.)
But between my dear wife and her rotten peaches, and my own overzealous bolt-tightening, it ended up being one of the, um, more frustrating home projects I've ever done. . .
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