Unum Plumbum, Unum Letum

Have you ever woken up with a song stuck in your head? Of course you have. We all have. This happens to me all the time. It happened to me this morning!

"What song?" you ask. "Gee, Officer Krubke" from West Side Story. The only problem is, my sick and depraved brain morphs it into a mash-up with the Violent Femmes'"Waiting for the Bus". I've been repeating "Gee, Officer Krubke, drive that thing fast, my precious time keeps slipping past."

That's neither here nor there, nor applicable to the anecdote I'm about to tell you, but I thought it offered an interesting look into the depths of my mind.

Undaunted by the episode of the prior weekend, I returned to the task of working on the plumbing in the house. I even tried to be authentic and let my asscrack hang out while wrestling with the pipes. Regardless of my backside attire, I took full advantage of those precious few moments when the kids aren't A) vying for my undivided attention and B) trying kill or maim one another.

The Comely and Buxom and Ailurophobic Bouddica took my daughter to a birthday party on Saturday, so it was just me and the boy. What better father/son activity is there than a trip to the hardware store? With the possible exception of fishing or stuffing dollar bills into a stripper's g-string, I could think of none. If you remember from the harrowing tale from last weekend, I was only able to replace three of the four stems in the two bathrooms. I decided with half of the family out of the house, this would be an excellent time to finish the task.

After laying down a layer of WD-40 that was enough to lubricate AND fumigate the interior space of the walls, the boy and I shoved off for manlier waters. I needed to get some new screws to mount the handles onto the stems so that they wouldn't jiggle as much when turned. I also bought light bulbs for my daughter's new pink floor lamp. Since there's a Chick-fil-A across the street from the Lowes (more or less), the lad talked me into buying him a lemonade and my stomach talked me into buying it lunch.

Back home, I shut the water off, reminded the boy not to flush the toilets, and then began wrestling with the stem. After a bit of forcing and muttered curses beneath my breath, the stem finally came out. I quickly replaced it with the new, and then turned the water back on. Immediately, a fountain of hot water came bursting forth to shoot me in the face like I was the antagonist in some kind of Tom and Jerry cartoon.

I'm kidding. What kind of a homo...wner would I be (yeah, I stole it from Jon--sue me. Unless you're Jon, then you might have a case) if I did plumbing like that? The fixture worked like a charm and I quickly went about swapping out the old screws so that now the new handles no longer jiggled when turned on. Do with that as you will.

No sooner had I exorcised the demons in my showers than the toilet downstairs began to leak from the tank into the bowl. Guess I have my Sunday project all lined up!

This was simple enough. Again, I returned to Lowes on Sunday (look, people...it's three miles from my house) and went to the dreaded plumbing section. Here I looked about until I found a working facsimile of the flapper from my toilet. My son, eager to push buttons, wanted to know if we needed help.

"Do we need help, Oh Master of the Plumbing Universe and He Who Provides Me with Dinner Daddy?" he asked, eagerly.

"DEAR GOD, NO!" I projected (all that time spent on the stage really was preparing me for a life of home repair--who knew?) for all to hear, "I don't feel the need to lose more brain cells by talking with the incompetent...help...they hire around here!"

I then decided that the 30-year-old shower head in my bathroom needed swapped out. I had done this in the kids' bathroom a few months ago, so I figured why should they get all the luxury of a non-calcified shower head? Looks like I just figured out my Sunday project, Part Deux.

Home again, home again, jiggity jog went this sumptuous plumbing hog. Five minutes later, the toilet downstairs was fixed and then, later in the evening, while my son was taking his bath, I switched out the shower head. Awesome.

It was even more awesome this morning when I didn't have to chip limestone off my body after showering. While that calcified exoskeleton might have come in handy during, say, clobberin' time, you will remember that Ben Grimm didn't get to stick his rock-covered penis in Susan Richards. Although, Alicia Masters wasn't a bad booby prize...

So, what's next? Well, I still need to work out the fabrication on the handles of the shower, and I want to finish the work on my daughter's closet and do the touch-up jobs on the trim and what not. Oh, and that whole replace the siding thing. And install new windows. And redo the brick molding on the front door.

Ah, the life of a homo...wner: always exciting.