misterx

You can laugh now, you probably don't do your own plumbing. In fact, you should probably skip this entirely. It's humor derived from the suffering of another, namely me.

It all started last week when the dog made a mess on the carpet. It was nasty. To properly clean things, I felt it needed steam cleaning, so I steam cleaned the carpet with our little home steam cleaner thingie. It's roughly the shape and size of a vacuum, actually quite handy. Anyway, this was my first time using the device, and after I was done I flushed the dirty water down the toilet. No prob, right? The channel that sucks up the water into the steam cleaner is not even 1/8" wide, so there was *no way* anything could clog up the toilet. Right? Right?

Wrong. Normally, yes, that would be true, but lo and behold, after disposing of the water the toilet is suddenly very SLOW to empty, threatening the user with high water levels for that brief "oh no!" moment every time you flush. I can't imagine what could be causing this. Was the carpet *that* dirty?? The next several days featured frequent use of a plunger.

The cause? When I went to put the steam cleaner away that night, I was missing a part. It's a plug for the hole where you connect an accessory hose. Over the next several days, I searched high and low for this part, until I could no longer ignore what I desperately wanted to ignore: the part had fallen off when dumping out the water, and was now lodged somewhere in the plumbing. Well, as of yesterday morning, the toilet basically wouldn't drain anymore, so I couldn't pretend any longer. Last night I got to take the toilet out, deal with the... stuff... therein, retrieve said part, and reinstall the toilet. This was entirely as much fun as you would probably suspect, and then some.

The night before last, I was out in a cold rain, working on Mel's car.

I am seriously considering starting an evening "going to a bar and drinking" ritual instead of doing projects like these. Urgh.