small corrections

There was the little problem of a running toilet. I didn't think a lot about it until our water bill arrived and my housemate was shocked to see it had doubled! She's a lot better at this stuff than me, and explained, based on our previous usage, that it couldn't possibly be accurate.

Thus, set off an enjoyable series of events whereby both of us, our landlady, two of her handymen, and two inspectors from the water department all tried to figure out where all that water went. PG&E, the utility monopoly, has even been drawn into the case, just because we assume they're responsible for mostly everything that goes wrong around here.

Besides, they occupied our neighborhood like an army for many months, eating up the streets willy-nilly, doing who-knows-what. At one point a hole opened up in the (newly poured) cement at the base of my neighbor's front stairs. Afraid she would step in it as she hurried off to work one morning, I asked the PG&E guy to fix it or cover it or something.

He seemed a bit reluctant until I mentioned casually, "By the way, she's a lawyer."

Soon after, our basement flooded but I can't say this was unexpected. Most winters, when we have too many heavy rains around here, the sewer backs up and fills the basement with about six inches of foul fluids. The landlady, who is from India, was suspicious that PG&E was responsible for the flooding, though to be fair, I don't recall them occupying our block in the previous winters I've lived here, which also led to basement backups.

Anyway, she hired a fellow to clean it up and apparently he sprayed lots of water down there in the process. You know the routine, throwing good water after bad...

Back to that running toilet. The handyman who pulled it out and replaced it with a new one is one of those guys who is virtually impossible to understand. In a town of many accents (most of which don't faze me), his accent might be called "marble-mouth-mumbling" in a kind of Splanglish.

I like this guy, who's name, wouldn't you know it, is "Able." Even though I can never understand what he tells me, he always shows up wearing a smile as he cheerfully proceeds to break whatever I have asked him to fix. This time, he cut an enormous hole in the bathroom wall and placed the new toilet more or less against it. To close the gap that remained, he laid in a line of caulk. That had the effect of making it impossible to raise the lid of the toilet when it, too, started to "run."

(I like that image -- of a running toilet. Sounds like a children's story.)

Anyway, the caulk never set firmly; maybe he used a perpetually soft type. In any event, over the coming weeks, I was able to struggle the top of the toilet off and stem the running when it occurred.

Then I noticed that the entire toilet appeared to be gradually migrating westward into the hole in the wall.

I cannot even begin to tell you how much this amuses me. It feels like fair retribution from the ghosts I upset in the backyard by digging up all these lost treasures from the old privy, closed up sometime in the late 1880s. That's what my housemate believes.

I guess we all had better be careful before messin' around with someone else's shit, eh?


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