Tried to install bidet in hall bathroom.
Put the whole thing together. Turned water back on. The assembly leaks where it connects to the toilet and where it connects to pipe.
Shut off water. Discover I have failed to put washer in piece that connects to toilet. Attempt to remove.
This is harder than it sounds. There are three components -- connection to pipe, connection to toilet, and connection to hose that connects to bidet --, and getting one of them to turn while the other two remain stationary is extremely difficult.
Get some rubber gloves so I can grip more effectively.
Eventually manage to dislodge connector from toilet. Insert washer. Reconnect. This is
much harder than it sounds. The first time, I connected the bidet to the toilet and then the pipe to the bidet. But I can't disconnect the pipe fixture now; it's on too tight and I can't remove it.
Eventually I work out a system where I screw to the right, then hold the connection stationary while I move the middle piece back to the left, then repeat until it's as tight as I can get it with a gloved hand.
Open valve. Still leaking.
This process goes on for awhile, culminating in my getting a pair of pliers. I can't tighten the connection any more than it already is, and in fact when I try to tigthen it more I actually rotate the piece inside the toilet tank that it's connected to, which causes
it to loosen and the little bit of water at the bottom of the tank starts leaking out.
Eventually I get it to stop leaking but by this point my fingertips are raw, my side hurts, and I decide that I am clearly in over my head and need to get somebody who is actually competent to come in and fix this tomorrow.
Fortunately, we have two bathrooms.
I explain all this, in abbreviated form, to my wife when she gets home.
We discuss dinner plans, and go buy groceries.
We return. She says "I have to go to the bathroom."
Now, here's the thing.
When you have one working toilet, sometimes you need to be more specific than "I have to go to the bathroom." In this instance, if she had, for example, said "I am going to hire a team of Sherpas, set up base camp, and expect to return after snowmelt," I could have said, "Hey, can you let me use the bathroom first if you're going to be in there awhile?" But that is not what she said.
So I unload the groceries. And she is still in the bathroom.
I put the groceries away. And she is still in the bathroom.
I start preparing a flatbread pizza. I preheat the oven, go outside and pick some rosemary, cut up a couple of tomatoes and green onions, and lay out a piece of flatbread, and she is still in the bathroom.
I go out back and piss on a tree.
I come back in and the flatbread is on the floor. A piece of it is missing, in a shape suspiciously similar to a dog's jawline.
I decide you know what, fine, we have more flatbread; I am not going to try and salvage the flatbread that the dog chewed on and then left on the floor. At least I hadn't put any sauce, cheese, or toppings on it yet. Dog can have remainder of piece she took. I tear it into pieces, put them in her dish, and sternly tell her "This is
not a reward for your behavior." This feels satisfying even though dog does not understand any of those words.
Get second piece of flatbread; make pizza. It comes out pretty well actually.
Wife and I watch True Stories, which
I bought back in November but haven't had a chance to sit down and watch yet. (Saw it once about 15 years ago.) It is a delightful film. Here is the music video for Wild Wild Life.
As I was loading that video, my computer locked up and I had to do a hard reset. (I have some weird intermittent problems with watching videos on YouTube. I'm thinking I'll do a rebuild and ditch OpenSUSE in favor of Antergos, which I'm running in the living room and has worked pretty well for me, but I'm waiting until the next generation of AMD graphics cards come out first. Navi, I think?) But miraculously, this post survived!
So, lessons learned today:
* There is a kind of tape you're supposed to wrap around plumbing fixtures before you connect them to prevent leakage. This was not mentioned in the bidet manual but would have been good to know!
* Maybe I should stop trying to fix things myself. I'm barely competent to build a computer (the USB3 slots on my chassis do not work because I managed to pull the wires out of the connector), my experiences with soldering have mostly served to prove that I am not good at soldering, my phone reception is spotty ever since I opened it up to try and fix the power button and knocked the antenna loose (and still wound up having to pay someone else to fix the power button), and now it turns out I am not competent to perform even the most basic plumbing installations. Maybe this is a time in my life where I should accept that I am not very good with my hands and let other people take care of these things for me.
* True Stories is a delightful movie, David Byrne's brain is a wonderful place to spend ninety minutes, and it serves as a good reminder that this shit is small potatoes and I am still capable of joy.