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toilet and ear wax
Sunday, October 27 2002
setting: rural Hurley, New York
I'd been thinking of the toilet seals as being made of grease, but they're actually comprised of a sort of soft wax having the color and consistency (but probably not the flavor) of earwax. I'd bought a replacement for the toilet's wax seal, so today I endeavored to reinstall the toilet into the half bathroom (the one with the new parquet floors). The only problem was the fact that the toilet had been out in the yard for the past several days hillbilly style and was too cold for the wax to form a good seal, so I had to dump lots of hot tapwater on it before proceeding with the installation. The wax seal looked a little big for the space between the toilet and the plumbing, but with a little rocking back and forth, the toilet settled down just fine. The only real problem with the installation was a leak in a gasket in the toilet's water supply hose, but I managed to solve this with plumber's putty.
Later on I was going about the business of trying to install the pedestal sink when I realized that there was no way to effectively bolt it to the wall. So I had to rip out some drywall and stick a piece of two by four back in there just to have something firm to accept lag bolts. I wonder if there are any people who are so traumatized by the lack of studs that they've built rooms the inside of whose walls are comprised entirely of studs.
In the evening Gretchen and I went to Lowes to pick up a bunch of lumber in anticipation of my working with Katie's boyfriend Louis (a contractor) on the bedroom suite in the upstairs attic.
[REDACTED]
For dinner, we stopped at a place called the Dragon Buffet, a Chinese buffet restaurant attached to a mall. They had an amazingly lavish spread of food which included everything from crab legs to sweet and sour bean curd. Looking around the place at the varied customers: old men eating alone, seemingly gay Eddie Vedder wanna-bes, and any number of men and women sporting obscenely non-ironic 80s hairdos, I was pleased to realize that no similar experience could possibly be had in Brooklyn.
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