Day in the Life of an Idiot

Image: three (one still quite small) iris bulbs poking up despite the weather. 

As my friend (and captain!) bcholmes said when we were all complaining about how cold it's been (both here and in Toronto), "It's like we broke the weather or something."  In fact, we had EXACTLY one nice day this weekend. It was a strange one, though, since it was weirdly wet and humid.

That was Saturday, the day I was Butch to the Max (tm).

It started, as it always does, with a toilet.

As you all may remember, I had to replace the guts of the toilet upstairs earlier this year. That toilet continues to flush like a dream. However, the downstairs toilet's handle has decided to get looser and looser. Initially, I could spin the little plastic tightener-thingie on the back of the handle and it would stay right for a week. Now it was loosening every day. Then the chain became so rusty that it snapped. So, off to Menards!

Turns out, you can buy just the handle so we did. I had a chain already from previous tips.

The chain was a two second replacement.

The handle??

It should not have taken so long to replace as it did. I will bet you that Shawn and I worked on that stupid thing for an hour and a HALF. The directions were no help because they basically just showed you how the pieces came apart, not how to reassemble them when the toilet was involved. Plus, there was an actual design flaw.

The part of the handle that had the bar that holds the chain had a wingnut as part of its design that was too big. You could never tighten it enough to get the bar to stay in position. So, every time you flushed the toilet, it would work the first time like a dream, but the second time it would loosen up and swing wide and get caught on other various inner workings of the toilet bowl. We kept trying with the tools at hand until Shawn finally thought to supplement with nuts from our own basement. We finally got it going, but my hands were numb from all the time I spent with them inside the icy cold water of the toilet tank.

But that was just the FIRST butch thing I did on Saturday.

Next, we started painting the bedroom. Everything went fine with that, but I always wash the walls before I start and for some reason that corner of the house has always collected weirdly MASSIVE dust bunnies.

Like weirdly massive. Like, inhumanly large mats of dust. I am deeply uncertain why this room causes this particular phenomenon. Drafts? An ancient curse? Both??

Because no matter how often we pull out these monsters, they seem to reappear in a matter of months. (I mean, I suppose we could stay on top of them if we were the sort of people who cleaned every day, but what do you take me for?) One of the things I was painting in that corner included the radiator and, again, I bet I spent hours just pulling dust monster after dust monster out of the radiator.

GROSS.

Speaking of ancient curses, however, I also found an odd clay ball inside the radiator "guts," if you will. It was very fragile and it broke as I removed it. I seems to have been a solid mass of some sort? My only thought was that it had the consistency of really ancient, hardened PlayDoh, so maybe it was some forgotten child toy? OR THE VESSEL OF THE DUST GODDESS.

But, it's removed now, so hopefully so is the dust curse???

At any rate, all this cleaning and god banishing meant that I didn't even start painting until after 1 pm. The wall space is actually very small, if you don't count the radiator, so I really should have been able to have to room done by dinner time. However, I was painting a relatively light blue over a maroon, rusty red. Technically, I believe Mr. Lauren called his color "Kalahari Sunset."  Regardless, that color took THREE coats to cover, so I was unable to finish before dinner. Quite regretfully, Shawn and I agreed to leave things as they were for one night. I had my Star Trek RPG on Saturday night as well, so it seemed like a good reason to give it a rest until morning.

She ended up sleeping in Mason's room, while I slept on the couch in the TV room. 

It only took me maybe two hours on Sunday to finish things up? It took Shawn quite a bit longer to finish up the new curtains--she was having a day of it, too, with pins shifting and the bobbin being a bitch on the old Singer. But, we used to have rather dark velvet curtains in that room, and now we have two (different!) flower-patterned curtain sets. Shawn made them both out of old duvets that we picked up via our "Buy Nothing" group on Facebook.

Now I am a stiff and sore old lady, but I feel very accomplished in terms of home improvement.

How was your weekend?