Mar 23 2009
the frank factor
you may or may not be aware, but ben and i have a very special talent. we possess the remarkable ability to make any task more complicated and take at least three times as long as it should, simply by being present. the force is strong with us. the best example of this is probably the great toilet replacement of '08, in which a simple remove-old-toilet-put-in-new-toilet job that should've taken a couple hours tops required no less than 4 trips to home depot and no less than EIGHT hours. you'd think we'd have to be idiots and spectacular screw-ups to make that happen, but oh no, my friends. such is the power of the frank factor; we didn't do anything wrong. the first problem was that when we finally got the gross old toilet to surrender it's grip on the floor, it took half the flange with it. fine. we'll go get a new one, unscrew the old one, screw in the new one, bada-bing-bada-boom. except that the old one was welded into the pipe in the floor and not coming off ever at all ever. i suppose here we could've investigated and tried to unscrew it before going to the store, but since it was ya know, kinda poop covered and who in the ham sandwich would weld the frickin' thing to the pipe in the first place, we did not. argh. home depot again, returning with a flange repair kit, which is essentially the top metal ring part that screws through whatever parts left of the old flange and into the floor. swell, we're on the way now. except that the screws are no match AT ALL for the bathroom floor. the go a little way in, then bend, or don't really go at all. one goes in about halfway, just enough to make us hopeful, then breaks off in the floor. in the floor. right under the hole. there was much cursing. home depot. mammoth, concrete devouring screws (for real this time) acquired, angrily drilled into floor, except in that one spot of course. huzzah! all we have to do is put on the waxy goo and put on the new toilet and we are free to poop! except. our new toilet is (as any good newer model should be) a bit more slim in the bottom it seems and lacks the extra space required by the repair kit flange top. use your imagination, fill in the very blue blanks and then multiply it times ten. we remove the lovely new toilet and stare in a manner than would make any redneck who likes to look at car engines proud. then, true to that redneck heritage, i mutter something along the lines of "fuckit" and grab the hammer, giving the flange the nips and tuck it needed. then we put the bloody toilet down and muscled it into place in a way certainly unbecoming of a lady and caulked that bastared to the floor. i applied a little more redneck ingenuity to the levelling process that i'll leave out of the blog since we do want to sell the house at some point and it might freak some people out. we then noticed it was 8 o'clock-ish and wondered how we had spent an entire saturday doing something so simple.
yesterday, the frank factor showed that even the internet is no match for it if it's angry enough. we went and got a shiny new battery charger for our lawn mower battery sos we could make it go mow. upon examining the battery, we couldn't find any indication as to the voltage. no worries, i memorized the model number of the mower real quick-like and went inside to use the google. not so helpful, as it turns out. we could find part numbers, diagrams of the various systems and even a manual, but none of these things simply said "12V battery." we looked up the battery number on the battery maker's site, and while they were happy to sell it to us, they didn't seem to think we needed to know the voltage. we'd found some indication that it was likely a 12V battery, but nothing really definitive, and since we could fry the thing if we set the charger to 12 and it was on some off chance a 6V, we weren't too comfortable with it. somewhere in the middle of the process we realized it'd be much faster to just call the man down the street who sold it to us and ask, so we did, but no one was home. finally, after trying every possible search combination known to man, some obscure thing came up to verfiy that it was, in fact, a 12-volt battery. that's right, it took us a little over half an hour to be able to hook our lawn mower battery up to the charger. it's a gift. sadly a non-returnable one. sigh.
and then halfway through the mowing process the blade belt came off and once we got it back on we couldn't get it to tighten enough to turn on. we stared at it for a while, jiggled things, then it got too dark to really see anything, so we gave up and our front yard has a lovely haircut now. i was talking to my dad last night and he had a suggestion, so hopefully that'll work when i get home tonight and i can take care of the silly looking yard and then ben and i can have the satisfied, accomplished feeling that makes the beer taste better and the gas-and-grass perfume smell more pleasing. we were robbed last night, man. stupid frank factor.