Sunday things

I went to bed late again the night before, boo. I did not pick up my phone other than look at the daily „Questionable Content“ comic (which I get a day early because I am a subscriber on Patreon). I still managed to be late and look up new books to read between morning pages and fiction writing. And no, I definitely do not need any more books to read, I don’t know what I was thinking.

I did make myself work on the manuscript for twenty minutes, at least. My husband showed up some time while I was journaling and so I decided to eat breakfast first and do yoga later. And for once I actually did it. Unfortunately, by then the living room was a cozy 28 °C (82 °F) so I only did five minutes because I felt like I was melting.

Husband and I had a really nice conversation before, then I did my usual morning things, remembered that I was supposed to wake the boy at 10 but for once he did hear his alarm.

I called my mother on the phone and talked to her for almost an hour, mostly about various aunts and life in a small town with no public transportation to speak of vs. my mother-in-law’s life in a town twice as big next to Munich with buses going everywhere and family next door.

My husband was making something from a YouTube video again, and as always he had the video on his desktop computer in his studio at the other end of the house. Yes, I offered to pull the video up on the TV in the living room next to the kitchen, I would also have lent him my tablet, but no.

I helped a bit with grating cheese and cutting porcini. The food was very tasty:

Since the boy had been up so early he also ate lunch with us which was nice. He is in study-mode again so we didn’t see him for long. I took a short break and ate some chocolate. I re-downloaded one of the silly iPad games again but set a timer and only played for twenty minutes.

Then I finally set my goals for the month, basically continue all the projects I started, planned the week and read. My plan had been to finish cleaning, mount the new toilet seat and then spend an hour or two on the WordPress course.

Well. I vacuumed, I pried the old toilet seat off the toilet which took quite some time and a lot of force. Let me show you the screws and you’ll understand why that wasn’t easy:

I think I tried unscrewing one of these for ten to fifteen minutes until figuring out that the corresponding nut wasn’t moving so I spent most of that time just moving both of them round and round. In the end I used a big, fat wrench to force a metal piece off the screw and finally got it lose.

Then I unpacked the new toilet seat. It seemed in order, there seemed to be all the parts and I tried understanding the diagram. There was of course, the lid and the seat, also two hinges, some long screws and some plastic nuts. I started putting the hinges on the seat and – had a problem. The bolt on one of the hinges wouldn’t fit.

I’m not quite sure how long I tried, turning the lid, seat, bolt and hinges this way and that but I just couldn’t put it together. While I was fumbling around my husband had coffee with a friend. He showed up while I was peering at the instructions, putting parts here and there.

So we tried it together. I’m usually better with this kind of puzzle than him but in the end it became clear that there was just no way the left bolt would fit in the corresponding hole in the toilet seat. It turned out there was a ridge at the edge of that hole where there should be none and so the hole was too small.

But my husband came to the rescue and filed the ridge down, hurray! I put seat and lid together, figured out how all the plastic parts fit together for the underside of the toilet, looked at the diagram again and found that there was a plastic part missing. The diagram clearly showed three thingies, a big round one on top, then a smaller threaded one further down and a massive one on the bottom. For each side. But there was only one massive plastic thingy, not two.

We looked everywhere, I took every single crochet blanket out of the baskets under the coffee table, my husband looked in his studio where he had filed the hole bigger, I looked in the packaging, the bathroom, everywhere, but the thing was not to be found.

I put the three thingies together the way they were supposed to go to figure out what we could use instead. I found that the massive thing didn’t really attach to anything, there was just a hole that fit the threaded thingy perfectly. And then I got it! The massive thingy was just the tool to screw everything together without breaking the plastic. Duh! There were two on the diagram because you used it on both sides, not because you actually needed two.

I felt a bit dumb.

My husband and I finally put the toilet seat together. This one won’t moved sideways under our butts because unlike the old one it only fits one size toilet. And lo and behold, we mounted it less than a week from ordering it, hurray!

After that I cleaned the edge of the bathtub as well since I was already in the groove.

All of that took all the time until dinnertime. I ate and talked with my husband some more, I read a little, I started writing this post, I did Duolingo and made a list for today, I watched some C-drama and went to bed.

And today we’re all crossing our fingers for the boy’s exam. The poor thing also has a dentist’s appointment in the afternoon.