Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.

Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.

“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.

But why the quick onset of the killing rage?

Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.

We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:

I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.

MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.