| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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the toilets, man, they all suck. low slung tanks with no umph. every shit draws circles around the bowl as it spirals down. two or three flushes the norm. so today i installed a cadet 3. it is still a 1.6 gpf low-flow toilet, but all the same, a powerhouse in the realm of unassisted, gravity flushing toilets. i just made my first deposit. a truly superior flush. clean, smooth, and quick. exactly how you want to see your feces depart. the seat is also great. $14.95, molded wood deal. often refered to as the "cheap-o seat." but it turned out to be wonderful. my ass fits perfectly. i read about 25 pages while passing my first collection of six-inch bricks, and in the end, no red ring. no red ring! amazing. i am so please. it is really satisfying to do some honest and productive labor that allows you to relax while doing some honest and productive labor. |
i wish i could marry nate. |
i sliced my finger open today on the sharp edge of the tile they trimmed to fit around the outflow flange thing. i waited until i was done installing the toilet to clean it out. i might be typing with seven fingers next time you hear from me. |
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lately i have been bogged down by home ownership. actually, i hate it. i love our home, but i hate the responsibility of keeping up with it. i feel stuck thinking about that stuff, keeping up with the to do list. i don't want to fix the toilet in senor's bathroom. i want to pretend there's not a small puddle of water under the tank. i'd prefer a landlord handle, while i go out surfing. not that i can surf here in austin, but i guess i'm referring to the freedom of a former life. i also feel bogged down by stuff. there's too much stuff. i wish we had about half of everything we owned and less than half of the things we are storing. i want to move far away from texas. i'm angry that, while we bought a house well below our means, we're not able to live, as a middle class american family of three, on a single salary that's creeping up on six figures. why is that? why all the debt? why all the stuff. i feel trapped. funny, people always say how expensive it is (or must be) to live in hawaii. but in hawaii, i never had debt and always had a ton of money in the bank. money to travel, money to pay for a body building trainer. money to do just about anything i wanted to do. so rarely was the money spent on stuff (unless it was surfing related gear). it was spent on doing things. sometimes i wish i could take my family, my life as it is now, and turn back time. it's like, yo, i got what i came here for, now let's get the fuck out. |
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I guess there's no grass on either side of the fence. I get the impression that debt is the American way. |
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wherever your heart leads you, sarah. if austin loses one sorabjite it may gain another one eventually: i've always hoped to "retire" there one day. or at least on our land in the hills around austin. debt is part of what drives the american economy. i remember seeing those "faces of laos" pictures that mark posted. i buy all my booze from a laotian who owns the liquor store near where i work - mr. frichithavong. i mentioned those pictures to him, but he didn't seem interested in them - in fact, just wanted to politely brush the subject off. maybe he just wants to forget laos, or maybe just be thought of as an american. do you live with your brother, dr. pepper? |
No, I lives with my dogs... |
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i want to live in laos now. or western samoa. or new zealand. an old friend from hawaii landed there with his wife, they just had their fist baby days ago. or uganda. at a mission or something, even though we're not religious. i don't know. when i was in kindergarten, i fully plaragized an entire work and turned it in as my own book, bound and illustrated. other kindergarteners ratted me out to the teacher (Miss George), but i denied it. i wonder if Miss George ever talked to my parents about this plagiarism during a parent/teacher conference, but no mention was ever made of it. i plagiarized it because the assignment was to write our own book but apparently i didn't have enough imagination to come up with my own story. i remember trying really hard to think up of something and couldn't, so instead i plagiarized what i think was my favorite book at the time. it was a book about a bunny. |
And has anyone heard from Moonit? I'm beginning to worry. |
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1. turn off the water at the wall 2. remove the wax gasket from the box and float it in a sink of warm water. you want to get the wax to about 70F but not a lot more than that (soft but not melted). 3. flush the toilet until it has drained as much as you can get it to drain and then mop out the rest of the water in the bowl and tank with the towel. 4. unscrew the water inflow hose from under your tank. use a bowl to catch the little bit of water that will probably come out. 5. remove the two nuts at the base of the toilet. 6. rock the toilet back and forth and then lift it straight up and off the bolts. 7. remove the old gasket. stuff a rag in the outflow pipe. remove all the wax from the horn under the toilet and the outflow flange. 8. press the new wax gasket onto the horn under the toilet. the rubber flange pointing down (towards the sewer). 9. carefully put the toilet back into place on the bolts. you should feel the wax compress a bit as you press down on the toilet. 10. rock the toilet a bit to seat it well in the wax. 11. make sure the toilet tank is parallel to the wall behind it and then put the nuts back on. alternate tightening the nuts until you have them finger tight, and then tighten them a few more turns with the wrench. the toilet should be just-firmly in place (ie. not rocking). don't tighten past that point or you might crack the bowl. 12. rehook up the water to the tank, turn on the water at the wall, and give it a few test flushes to make sure there are no leaks. i've never had one leak, but if it does, cuss a bit and then repeat the process with a new gasket. if the bathroom was remodeled with tile, the outflow flange might be extra low (below floor level) in that case you might need a larger gasket (no 10) or a no 3 gasket with an addition wax ring (the kind without the rubber flange). you'll be able to tell by looking at the gasket you remove. you might want to buy a no 3 gasket and an additional wax ring just to be safe. it shouldn't take you more than 1-1.5 hours, depending on where your hardware store is. it is easier than it sounds. there is no reason to call a plumber unless you don't have to pay for it. if water is getting into your subfloor you're going to get rot or fungus and that's going to take a lot more time and money to fix. so do it soon. |
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what if the leak doesn't seem to be coming from the base of the toilet? the little puddle is actually under the right side of the tank, about 2-3 inches behind the base of the toilet. |
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i assume you have a 2 piece toilet? (bowl and tank) it could be the gasket between the tank and the bowl. that is easy to fix, as well. just dry out the toilet and remove the water inflow hose. then, find the two nuts on the outside of the toilet, under the tank. take those off and the tank will lift off the bowl. there is a rubber gasket between tank and bowl that you just replace and then reattach the tank. a more likely possibility is a leak around one of the bolts that hold the tank to the bowl. they should have rubber washers on the inside of the tank that can be replaced. same process as above, but then you take the nuts off, pull out the bolts and replace the washers. or maybe you hate the toilet all together and just want to buy a new one. you can get a good one for under $200 and install by seating the new toilet on a wax gasket and then attaching the new tank. i'd recommend against once piece toilets. i hate those fucking things. another possibility is there is a crack in the tank or the bowl. you'd want a new toilet then. dry everything really well. the floor, the bottom of the tank, all around where the toilet bowl meets the floor. if the leak isn't immediately, visibly obvious, tape plastic wrap under the tank so each bolt and where the tank joins the bowl is sealed under plastic. flush the toilet or wait awhile -- the water will either appear in the plastic or on the floor and you'll know where the leak is. |
so you might check those bolts, sarah. i still want nate to marry me. |
My Chinese mother has a power assist toilet. I love taking a dump in that thing. |
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but then, i want a lot |
Anyway, she and my dad met about seven years ago or so because she took one of his classes. He's an English professor, which I think I have mentioned elsewhere. So she took his class to improve her English, and she brought him all these weird Chinese treats, and they hit it off, I guess. This happens a lot with his students, actually they get crushes on him even though he's in his 60s. I think it's really funny. She's a pretty neat lady. When she was very little, her dad sold her to a farmer because their family had no money. So she worked for the farmer for awhile, and then the farmer tried to sell her to a brothel owner, so she ran away to Taipei and worked in restaurants for a few years before coming to the United States when she was 18. She started with basically nothing and now has a small scale real estate empire. She didn't bother to learn English until fairly recently, so people look at her and think she's some stupid little old Chinese lady, and then *bam* she throws you for a loop. I love her ferociously. And I also find it very funny when we go out as a group, as we do now and then, because I look like a poster child for the Aryan Nation and I think it weirds people out when I call her mother. I remember once my father and I went with her to look at a house she was buying, and the real estate agent was obviously really, really confused. One of the reasons I'm glad to be living back home again is that I can hang out with my dad and my Chinese mother. Besides, her dim sum is better than most of the dim sum in San Francisco anyway. |
or maybe i want to be a chinese woman. i read a book a while back called "a thousand years of good prayers" by a chinese woman - an immigrant to the united states. in a way, i kind of related to the women in the stories. maybe if i were a chinese woman, nate would marry me. |
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Droopy, quiet, solitary, serene, is roused to unusual passion after encountering Nate, spirited, mercurial, unfettered by convention. Nate, overwhelmed by Droopy's surprising declarations of ardor, withdraws with an uncharacteristic coyness. Thus the chase begins. |
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i love toilets. they are so integral to two of my favorite activities (shitting and reading). plus, toilet repairs are really easy. you can do everything north of the outflow flange yourself, with minimal tools. no toilet repair will cost more than the cost of a new toilet, which could be as low as $100 or less. plus, not paying attention to some easy fixes caused a lot of damage in my first house. i'm a little hyper about it. |