. . . you know, the one that matched the other stuff in the bathroom. Yes, the one that you wanted the new faucet on:
No, I got the faucet on — that went OK. And I changed both shut-off valves because I think they were both leaking anyway, and they were fairly easy to replace.
But we do have a problem.
See, I broke the sink.
You might be wondering, "How did you break the sink?" And I want to tell you that I don't think there was anything I could have done differently so that the sink would have not been broken.
Like I said, the faucet went fine, but when I went to change the drain flange so that the stopper thingy could work with the faucet, I realized that getting the old apparatus off might prove difficult. And eventually it broke.
But now we're getting ahead of ourselves.
It's not to say that I didn't try my darnedest to get the old drain flange off. I bought spray stuff designed to loosen tight nuts. And when that didn't help, I went back to the hardware store to buy a special claw wrench with a long handle in order to get more leverage to twist that stuck nut.
But none of it was working.
So partly out of frustration and partly because I was backed into a corner and had no other choice, I started twisting, tweaking and ultimately banging the old flange. Suffice it to say, I eventually separated the drain flange from the bottom of the sink.
Unfortunately I also cracked the sink.
So in essence, we need a new sink.
I know you just got done bragging to your friends and co-workers about how "helpful" I have been and how "adept" I am at fixing stuff around the house. I hope this doesn't change your opinion of my wider body of work. But like I said, I don't think there was any way I could have gotten that drain flange off the sink.
I've been on Amazon for a half-hour or so trying to find a replacement sink that will drop in to the vanity we already have, because — wouldn't you know it? — vanities are more expensive than you'd think.
I'll continue my search but for the time being I think I need to drink a beer. Or two.
The toilet that was in the house was a beautiful old pink toilet. We weren't exactly sure when it was from but it was from a ways back.
It was also giant bitch of a toilet. It took about ten minutes to fill after you flushed it. It was like riding around in a pink ceramic Cadillac.
As renters, we never had to think about water rates or water bills or anything about the water other than we were entitled to it.
As homeowners, every time we flushed that bitch of a toilet we thought about the water bill — and the longer it took to refill — every 30 or 40 seconds (or ten minutes) of listening to water drain, drain, drain into the tank — the more it shook you to your very core.
But like I said, it was a beautiful pink toilet. Of course the lid was cracked in two, and there was the slightest hairline fracture in the bowl itself, which, if you didn't clean the toilet for a few days, developed just a hint of a funk-mold hairline that waved in the current when the toilet flushed. Which is to say, we probably needed to replace the toilet.
Now when you get to replace a toilet there's a certain thrill in shopping for the most water efficient model ever created. You study the liters-per-flush stats and it just kills you how fucking green you are being. It hurts.
The only thing with buying a new toilet is that there are only three colors they really make: white, off-white and black. With our pink and black tiles, that left us just one real choice — black. The rock 'n roll toilet.
When it came to paint colors, I deferred entirely to Jen. When it comes to most style decisions, I defer to her. But for some reason I was really adamant about having a rock n' roll toilet. It just looked so correct. So that's what we did. We bought a rock n' roll toilet. And a rock n' roll toilet seat to go with our rock n' roll toilet.
The other thing that was sweet: You can buy a toilet on Amazon and they will deliver a toilet to your house. I don't know how we would have done it otherwise.
How hard is it to install a toilet? Like everything else — negotiating real estate, pruning rose bushes, raising children — you Google it. It's pretty straightforward, though I did have to go to more than one place to find a flange — the thingy that attaches to the subfloor that holds on the toilet itself (what those two bolts at the bottom do).
That said, there is the issue of the wax ring. If you've never unhooked a toilet from the floor, the wax ring is a ring of wax that globs together the toilet pedestal to the flange and seals the waste line from the rest of the bathroom. The only tricky thing about the wax ring is that after you glob it to the bottom you don't really see it once you set the toilet on the floor — so there's really only one shot to get it right. After it's on there, it's hidden from view for as long as you want to ignore it.
There's nothing like the feeling of accomplishment after installing a toilet and flushing it for the first time. And not seeing water seep out from the bottom of the base of it after you do so.
There is of course an irony in installing a water-efficient toilet: You (meaning I) are (am) much less likely to "let anything mellow" on the theory that you're never really wasting water with a water-efficient toilet. It's the kind of perverse logic that says that bicyclists and football players are safer without helmets.
I couldn't bear to part with the pink toilet completely, so I convinced Jen that we should install it in the backyard as a planter, as a way of sort of respecting the history of Kawama. It's not the ideal thing to plant stuff in — but not because of what you're thinking. Rather, a toilet is designed to hold water in the bowl, which means that it doesn't really drain correctly, which means that it kind of sucks as a planter. The stuff we had growing in there this summer did OK (a fern and some leftover hosta plants that were in the backyard when we moved in), but I don't know that we'll plant, say, herbs in there anytime soon. Like I said, drainage issues — plus, it's kind of gross to think about anyway. This isn't the best image — it's actually from August on the day before the hurricane/tropical storm hit when it was really raining — but you can see what we did:
In the end, I finally figured out when the bathroom dates from — it turns out that every toilet bowl basically has a date stamp. So this one says (if I can make it out correctly) "Nov 29 1965." Which means it was made the Monday after Thanksgiving in 1965:
I don't know that I've ever seen a newspaper article cite a song as a source, but there's always a first time:
The "Single Ladies" singer was elated about giving birth to Blue Ivy, her first child, after having a miscarriage and struggling with pregnancy, according to a song about her daughter released by Jay-Z two days after the baby's birth, "Glory feat. B.I.C."
It's sort of like saying, "Paul McCartney reported having 'a wonderful Christmastime,' according to the song 'Wonderful Christmastime.'"
(By the way, I'm still cheesed off by the reports that Jay-Z's entourage closed the NICU to fathers. Beyonce didn't exactly deny it, saying that "Security was very tight, but not just for the sake of it. [. . .] It was for the security of our daughter." That story made me really sad when I read it.)
We were following Beyonce's pending delivery while Jen recuperated in the hospital. I remember how little sleep we seemed to get in the two nights after Animal was born; my head hurt — ached — like I was up all night. It was enough just to stare at our child and be amazed by him. Which brings me to my second point: Where in the fuck did Jay-Z find the time to not only write a song but also go record it and release it to the world?
Jen made the point that he might have written the song beforehand. If so, I think that's even worse: How do you know what you're going to feel before it happens?
Every once in a while before Animal was born, someone might ask me something along the lines of "what I thought" or some such — the subtext, I always assumed, was "You're going to Disneyworld, baby! So exciting!" And the truth is that I didn't know what I thought — eventually I just got comfortable with the idea that I had no expectations about what it might be like, and that I didn't want to superimpose expectations about what parenthood would be like.
To be fair, most people — especially those who were already parents — tended to say something along the lines of "things "are going to change so much." That seemed less laden with expectation, but also a little foreboding.
Anyway, one thing I wouldn't have done was write a lyric like "The most amazing feeling I feel/Words can't describe what I'm feeling for real." Because A) The worst thing in the world for someone who expresses himself through words is to punt and claim that "words can't describe what I'm feeling" and B) If you're fudging and telling me what you're feeling in advance of feeling it, then telling me that you can't describe what you're feeling is . . . making my head hurt.
But to go back to "what I thought," one thing I remember feeling at some point long before Animal was a yolk sac on an ultrasound was noticing how ridiculous Jen and I probably started looking. It wasn't necessarily one thing in particular but rather a straw man (straw couple?) based a composite of a bunch of people I've met in passing and probably have seen depicted on episodes of Sex and the City. That's the Childless New York Couple. Not trying to judge — believe me — but after a while I kept thinking how goofy stuff like $40 mayonnaise really is. We probably look like total assholes. As Goober might say, "Take it to heart."
Let's put it this way, when I saw the New York Times' "Weekender" ad campaign something flipped in me, and I knew that wasn't how I ever wanted to perceive myself. "I'll trade you the Magazine for the Book Review"? You know what? Fuck you:
You know what you don't see in those ads? That un-unsheathed blue plastic bag-of-Sunday-advance-sections still sitting on the coffee table Tuesday evening, right next to the hand sanitizer and box of wet wipes.
The real lede of the Beyonce article above is that Jay-Z "of course" will change his daughter's diapers — the idea being that he'll help out, and not just materially. Which is good — "of course" — but I can't really see him waking up at 4 a.m. after the baby blows out its Pampers . . .
If I were him, I might have waited a few weeks until I released the song written to honor the birth of my child. It might go something like this:
It's 3:56 and wouldn't you know it, we're both still up You on the changing pad, me avoiding what's flying forth from your butt When you blow out your Pampers I wonder who the fuck designed mesh hampers
