FA MU-LAN MEETS HER MATCH!

Today is Toilet Great Leap Forward Day (trust me on this, eh!) and what more appropriate day one could pick to remodel one’s toilets simply staggers even a bizarrely creative mind (what little I have left of it, of course). Today we finally arranged, after a prolonged & sometimes contentious domestic battle over this issue, to have both the toilets in our 1957-constructed home replaced with modern counterparts by a professional plumber. This option selected over the protests and objections of wifie, who (along with her baby-sister) thinks that because we have the complete 90s edition of the Home Depot Homeowner’s Do-It-Yourself Library (12 volumes, illustrated) such a ‘simple’ task as removing an old toilet and installing a replacement only requires a workman skill-level of Minus-1 and the hand-eye motor coordination of a recovered Cerebral Palsy victim.

As a house-husband who at one time successfully (I like to think) replaced the entire front door and frame assembly myself, with the resulting eternal dissatisfaction and disapprobation of the Sweetness and Light partner I am married to, I have ever been reluctant to commit myself to home remodeling projects, since although the front-door replacement has been judged as a complete success by almost all of my male contemporaries, wifie somehow has never been satisfied that her male house-mate (I would say ‘soul-mate’, but one sometimes wonders about that euphemism!) has anywhere near the same level of skill as her younger brother (who seems to have been born with a hammer in one hand and a contractor’s license in the other).

Since I have long been rather profoundly dragging my feet over the admittedly important matter of house-updating and remodeling over the past several decades, my resistance to an overall remodeling of our two bathrooms recently suffered a direct hit (I think my resistance was at a record low when wifie opened up with her latest verbal barrage and I found myself capitulating fractionally so as to not disgracefully lose the war entirely) and I reluctantly agreed to proceed with at least with the toilet replacement part of wifie’s Great Bathroom Cultural Leap Forward plan (she’s Chinese, you see).

The ongoing battle was not helped at all by my energetic younger sister-in-law, who is rather spoiled as the distaff member of the household’s ‘baby of the family’ and used to doing things her way, and who insisted that because she helped replace the present toilets in our home (which was lived in by wifie’s parents prior to their demise) some years ago, it was a piece of cake that we could easily tackle ourselves. A few days ago I finally put my (dragging) foot down, fortunately, and told her that WE would resolve the toilet matter ourselves, thang-gue-furry-moosh, and made an appointment with a local plumbing business (Pocket Plumbing of Sacramento) to take care of this ‘simple’ convenience fixture replacement.

Came the designated day, the plumber arrived all steely-eyed and resolute, right on schedule and we sat back, fully agreeable to doing without any household running water in this time of strict hand-washing protocols for most of the next umpteenth hours. Note: As it turns out, this is a VERY small price to pay for complicated work of this sort! Everything went perfectly, as far as the toilet replacement in MY smaller bathroom went and I almost had to staunch a tear as my faithful old squatter was thanklessly and roughly removed and a brand-new Kohler Star-Wars (actually their ‘Santa Rosa Model’, which given the fact that the City of Santa Rosa up in nearby wine country is presently on the verge of being burned to the ground in one of California’s raging wildfires, should have perhaps been interpreted as an ominous portent!) unit was installed in its place.

However, when the fixture in wifie’s cringingly pink-tiled bathroom was removed, it was suddenly found that the existing floor-interface collar (on which the wax seal is fitted) protruded above the level of the floor just enough as to pose a problem somewhat akin to keeping Death Valley National Monument’s famous teetering ''Balanced Rock’ stably secure from a tumble. Oh dear (her words, not mine, which were a bit more Irish in character and scatological in referent nature)! Our plumber (David) called me in to take a look at the problem and there, in all its rusty brown glory, the naked old (1957-installed) floor fitting stared out at me with all the baleful appeal of a long-neglected, crap-encrusted outhouse cesshole! Yow.

Mind you, I am not necessarily a fussy, prissy person when it comes to hygienic standards and I’ve used plenty of aesthetically unappealing toilet outlets, outhouse ‘holes’ and even cesspool couplings in my many decades of life! But somehow, the sight of this exposed sewage draining connection, coming close to lunch time, really didn’t sit well with me. Especially since wifie had meanwhile returned from a nearby bakery with two yummy almond croissants, intended to assuage the hunger that usually attends lunchtime. She had placed both of them on the kitchen counter, after taking them out of the paper bag they were picked up in, leaving the kitchen for a moment to come survey the daunting new development herself.

I explained the unanticipated but rather serious ‘glitch’ in the progress of the toilet replacement to her, even promising to cover the additional $500 that removal and installation of a new, modern plumbing standards coupling necessitated, and she quickly returned to the kitchen where she had left our lovely female Siberian Husky female (Her Serene Imperial Grand Duchess NALA) by herself for scarcely less than a minute! I also returned to my adjacent man-cave and was grimly refocusing on some writing I had underway, when….

Suddenly, there was a yelp from the kitchen…unclear as whether human or canine, but whatever the cause, something DREADFUL had clearly just happened out there, so both the plumber and I jumped up from our respective stations with alarm and hastened to the kitchen (wifie’s ‘office’, as it were) to see what was the matter!

Arriving there in a dead heat, we gaped dumbly, trying to figure out what had prompted such an unearthly cry, but no wifie! And no husky-girl. But from the sound of it, both were in the adjacent family room where wifie was verbally releasing a score of archaic old Cantonese curses as she intermittently scolded NALA! And it was suddenly easy to see why, since instead of TWO almond croissants on the kitchen counter that had been there just seconds ago, now there was only one.

The missing croissant had in fact already been partly digested by the Grand Duchess, who was hunkering down over it behind my reading chair in that room! Remnants marked the scene of the crime; TV’s ‘Mr. Monk’, the Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau, or even Jonnie Lee Miller’s lackluster ‘Sherlock’ character in the contemporary ‘Elementary’ TV series (co-starring lushious, but also lackluster Lucy Liu) would have had no difficulty at all in solving this particular crime. And to cap it all off, the Grand Duchess herself was still licking crumbs off of her muzzle!

The evidence was overwhelming and also damning! I could almost hear the courtroom gavel echoing thunderously on the judge’s podium: “Guilty as charged! No more doggie biscuits for you, you miserable canine wretch! (for at least the afternoon).”

NALA, who quickly recovers her regal composure after such trivial embarrassments, grinned complicitly from behind her reading chair sanctuary and licked her lips appreciatively!

What could I do but gamely offer to split my untouched pastry with wifie, but she either nobly refused it with an heretofore unguessed at generosity (less likely), or conveniently assumed a Joan-of-Arc martyr’s affect by telling me that I could have it entirely to myself, huff-huff (more likely). [Add more guilt to whatever burden of ethereal husbandly sins we XY-chromosome equipped humans must eternally bear as our sad lot in life!]

And so, the toilet replacement process, which had I been the person to discover this major impediment in trying to install the new toilet myself, would have been seriously perplexed (if not totally stymied) by this almost irresolvable difficulty, continued for several more hours. Eventually, everything was finally completed, but instead of a mere US$465 for what the plumber had originally described as a ‘routine toilet replacement job’, the total damage control figure came to twice that!

I am sorely tempted to remark in passing that replacing toilets in one’s home (especially if it’s a home that’s some 63 years old, like ours) is and can often be a shitty business, both functionally and monetarily! But, out of due deference to observing the niceties and conventions of all the many good little God-fearing ladies who doubtlessly frequent this venue, I shall refrain from using that particular word and simply say ‘surprising’.

Overall, considering the unanticipated installation complication and all the surprises it included, I suppose the worst part of resolving the floor-fitting dilemma has been having to put up with the lack of household water for most of the day and (not least for someone like me with vestigial ADD) the likely decibel equivalent of having the New York Municipal Transit System install a new subway line in the room next to my normally tomb-like study.

Thank God I didn’t decide to tackle this ‘simple’ project myself and instead decided to let the professionals do the work! From what I have seen earlier today, there’s a very good reason why professional plumbers charge so much for their work. And considered the fact that removal of the old fitting and installing the new one required considerable time & effort working under the floor in a teeny-tiny sub-floor crawl-space, it is eventually quite clearly seen by a geezer like me as money well-spent!

I am hopeful (probably in vain) that all this has given wifie a good and clear demonstration of both how difficult, costly and effort-intensive most older house-renovations can be, but would not be willing to put any money on that bet if I were a gambler! The only remaining question is ‘how long will I be able to forestall’ her ultimate ambition to entirely remodel the rest of both bathrooms!

Wish me luck on that last score and please…if you’re a good Roman Catholic…kindly ask Saint Gertrude of the Perpetual Irritable Bowel Syndrome to intercede for me, next time you visit Father MacGillicuddy at the Sacred Phart Cathedral for confession (lighting a votive candle to her would probably be a nice touch, also, if you''re so inclined!).

EPILOGUE:

One final comment: There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘ordinary, everyday heroes’. Policemen are heroes, fire fighters definitely qualify for that honorific, and I can now say that professional plumbers are also up there in the highest level of that rarified pantheon of our contemporary accomplishers of heroics!

EPILOGUE TO THE EPILOGUE:

It is now a day after our celebration of Toilet Great Leap Forward Day (which curiously coincides this year with Chinese Moon Festival Day) and as I sit here, tappity-tapping out this plaintive tale, smugly congratulating myself on having cleverly lost a battle (the Toilet Upgrade Skirmish) so as to save myself from losing a war (the Total Bathroom Remodelling War), I hear her toilet flush, quickly followed by wifie''s cute little Chinese-accented voice saying, somewhat uncertainly, from the adjacent hallway: "I think I need to replace the toilet seat! It doesn''t fit my small bottom!" [Note: I''m pretty sure Master Sun Tzu didn''t cover that detail (in the part that dealt with providing latrines for female warriors like Fa Mu-Lan) in his famed 5th Century (BCE) ''Art of War''...]

ARRRRRRGH! Alert! Alarrrrum! Man the battlements, get the pikes together on the barricades! Stand by to repel the barbarians!.....

[The End...and I do mean THE END!]