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vanblarcum bidet
Sunday, March 14 2021
It being the first day of daylight savings time, Gretchen had a slow start to her Sunday workday, so I was the one who took the dogs for their morning walk. I took them south to near the end of the Farm Road, then up the steep escarpment and home back along the edge of the plateau. It was cold and sunny, and I hoped the dogs might go off on their own for a time, but they were only out in the woods about five minutes longer than I was.
I took my usual 150 mg recreational dose of pseudoephedrine and resumed my bidet hose project. Attempts to tighten the NPT fittings further to stop a remaining leak actually resulted in new leaks from joints whose leaking had stopped. To fix this once and for all, I was going to have to go back to soldered connections. This meant I had to go get another half inch ball valve with sweat connections.
This time I drove to Herzogs, where things are more expensive but also of reliably better quality. That ball valve with NPT fittings had cost about $10 at Lowes, and the one with sweat fittings I bought today at Herzogs was about eighteen dollars, though it had a little bleeder relief cap that I wouldn't be making use of. I also bought a tall narrow rectangular container for organizing more crap in the laboratory. Then I went to the Hannaford mostly to buy more energy drinks. While there, I also got tempeh, tofu, and bold & spicy bloody mary mix. I'm finding that I enjoy drinking energy drinks when I'm driving just as much as I enjoy drinking road beers. All I apparently need is some little signifier that I am having a good time.
Meanwhile, the weather was churning back and forth frantically between nearly-clear sunny skies and dark hastily-gathered clouds dumping snow mixed with balls of ice, all of it pushed by unpleasantly strong winds.
It didn't take me long to install the new valve and have a leak-free bidet hose system. If only things had gone this well yesterday evening, I would've had many hours to do other things this weekend. Next I turned my attention to the task of installing a hook on the tiled half wall to the left of the toilet (from the vantage point of someone sitting on it). Using photos I'd taken this summer of the opened-up wall, I figured out where the studs were running so I wouldn't have to use drywall anchors. But then I installed the support hardware 90 degrees from the way it was supposed to be hung, and I ended up having to drill additional holes in the mounting plate so the holes would line up with the places I'd drilled holes through the tile. But of course the new holes weren't quite in the right place, so the new bidet hose hook was now held by a single screw into the underlying stud, a problem I will have to fix later. In the meantime, though, we have the perfect toilet for dealing with the aftermath of the kind of diarrhea that leaves an asshole that cannot be cleaned with conventional toilet paper alone. Gretchen has a term for this kind of diarrhea: "vanblarcum," which she named after a Trump-loving candidate for Ulster County Sheriff for whom I once accidentally voted.
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