Feeling Flush

Sometimes it takes me years to commit to doing something. You could chalk it up to thrift or laziness, or a misguided priorities. Whatever. Take toilet seats... Not a biggy, but why would it take me three years to replace the toilet seats that came with the house? They are slightly stained - faintly gray with condensation streaks and rust-colored in small patches. And scrubbed down to the wood in a few places. I've tried to clean them. Really. I've tried.

This week was it, though... the deadline.

I said to myself, "This is it. Even though every man in this house" (four of them pass through on a pretty regular basis) "could care less about the condition of our toilet seats, I will no longer blush at the thought of appalled house guests and stray health inspectors who may crash through our door without a moment's notice."

So I did it. (Also, I was tired of seeing Martha Stewart in my dreams, hawking her Living Omnimedia products for personal hygiene.)

I did some comparison shopping first - seriously, how anal is that? - and finally made a return trip to Lowe's, where I stood so long in rapt contemplation of the toilet seat  inventory that a sales representative came over and held my hand.

I didn't want to spend a fortune. They're toilets seats for crying out loud. But I wasn't sure that anything but Kohler would properly fit on a Kohler john. Plus, some of the seats had some pretty highfallutin' technology: Self-closing lids, audible prompts, micro-biotic properties, and training wheels, to name a few.

In the end I put into the cart three identical seats that were one step above basic and sighed with relief.

Then I wandered over to the distressed plant display where I compared the virtues of a rackful of $7 spreading cypresses that were marked down to $2.50. You would have thought I was a plant proctologist, peering so deeply into the pots and poking into the root systems. Sheesh.

That exercise took a full twenty minutes before I finally selected five plants and headed home for a fun afternoon.

Tools, rubber gloves, antiseptic wipes, a roll of paper towels... I was good to go. Plus, I had cleaned all the bathrooms yesterday, so I wouldn't be grossed out if I did decide to hug my toilets, (which is the only way to describe getting your hands into position to unscrew the bolts.)

In an hour or so, I had figured out how to work the locking mechanisms that allowed for "easy removal for replacement and cleaning," had installed all three seats, and had even wrapped up the old seats - all nice and tidy - in the new boxes. Plus I hadn't broken anything, including toes.

Sad, isn't it, to be so thrilled over something so mundane.