To paraphrase a tweet by somebody at Slate. I would not know. The Blue and Only Toilet is not a low-flow terlet, thank you very much. It is an *old* toilet and when we moved into the Landfill back in the Jurassic Age, it trickled. You know how some toilets run? (Jiggle the handle!) Well, this toilet didn’t run. It trickled. All the time. I would wake up in the middle of the night to feed my baby and my hyper-sensitive ears would hear the trickling. I could also tell when the heat was coming on before it came on because I could hear the gas thingy squeaking in the basement but that’d be a whole ‘nother story.

Anyway, by the time we bought the Landfill, I knew how to fix a running toilet and an overflowing toilet and how to baby a slow toilet with fingers crossed that we wouldn’t need to call Dr. Nassoiy. I did not attain this knowledge until well into my adult years. As a young adult I was *terrified* of the idea of toilets overflowing. When I was a child back in the Jurassic Age, my otherwise totally competent parents would *panic* if the crappy old white toilet on Superior Street overflowed (which was not often). It was not until I had been hanging around with the GG for a while that I learned enough about toilets that I wasn’t afraid of them overflowing.

I learned just about everything I know about toilets at the *old* Houghton Lake Group Home. That would be the toilet in the photoooo. For one thing, when we still had that loverly old cabin, we could heat the place in the winter but we had to shut down the water for the duration. We could use the toilet because we could pump water from the well in the yard and throw buckets into it to flush it. Secondly, if you didn’t FORGET TO JIGGLE THE HANDLE, the toilet would often run. And it would usually run after I used it at that batscope hour of the morning. I would flush it and head back upstairs and the toilet would run and Grampa Garth would hear it running and have to get up to jiggle the handle. Garth 1, KW 0.

In a way, I miss those days. In another way, I appreciate the beautiful place that the GG and his sibs have built in its place.

Fast forward to maybe a dozen years ago… I was up at the Moomincabin and the grandparents were bumbling around getting ready for bed and I used the Moomincabin bathroom. I flushed the toilet and everything was all right. No sooner did I get upstairs when there was a minor panic. Apparently the next person who flushed the toilet encountered a near overflow. I went downstairs again and vigorously plunged the dern thing and was met with a barrage of questions about who might be putting “contraband” into the toilet. Nobody, Moom, at least not knowingly. We have a lot of people here using the toilet and stuff happens.

The Blue and Only Toilet has not trickled in many years. It took a while for me to get it to not trickle. The GG does not quiiiiite have the same uber-sensitive level of hearing that I do and I think he was thinking something like, “WTF is she talking about?” Eventually, he got it and fixed it and I have been using it ever since then, occasionally jiggling the handle or vigorously plunging it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.