#6 -- Love my toilet seat

Yes, yes. I love my toilet seat. Like I've said before, this will be a blog about anything and everything that I never thought I do. And this is definitely one thing that I never thought would come to pass. Here's the story:

A while ago, I decided that my toilet could use a new seat. The old one's rubber bumpers on the bottom had broken off, and it would slide around underneath me when I'd sit down on it, and was pretty much falling apart in general. So, I visited my friendly neighborhood all-in-on-super-mega store (you should all know which store I'm referring to...) and bought myself a new toilet seat. Of course, it was one of the cheap ones; I am still a college student after all and about as rich as one of those instant mock-cheesecake pies you can buy at said mega-store. Anyhow, got the thing and brought it home and installed it. Like a charm. And everything was grand.

That is, until the following day.

I noticed as I sat down on my new toilet seat that evening, that the little twist nuts that had been supplied with the seat to hold it to the porcelain base had come loose. As I was only slightly annoyed at this, I bent down under the toilet rim and tightened the screws once more.

The next day, they were loose again.

This pattern didn't have to repeat itself very many times before I became supremely frustrated with the setup and decided that I'd fix it. Stupid toilet seat wants to get the best of me does it. Well, I'll just show it what kind of engineer it had chosen as an opponent. At my earliest convenience, (read: the following Saturday, as I never have any free time available to me that is not contained within the hours of a Saturday) I ran down to the local hardware store and bought a pair of wonderful little things called lock-nuts. Ha-ha!

They went on wonderfully (a quarter turn at a time with a hex-wrench. (If you've never attempted to tighten lock-nuts on the underside of a toilet seat before I would suggest avoiding it) after just shy of an hour had passed. With my frustration now gone (no more nuts coming loose!) and lots of reason to gloat over my victory, I stepped away from the toilet with the understanding that I wouldn't have problems with that seat any time soon.

Any time soon ended up being about two weeks.

Don't get me wrong, the lock-nuts worked like a charm. Unfortunately, they worked too well. For I was cleaning the bathroom one day, standing on the closed toilet seat, wiping the walls down with bleach-water to avoid any unwanted growths (I really need to install that bathroom fan...) when the seat shifted and let out a mighty crack. Upon inspection, it became quite apparent that the seat (the donut-shaped portion, which is the necessary portion of the seat, of course) had broken.

I hung my head in defeat...and ignored the problem.

Not the smart thing to do.

It wasn't more than a few days later that, while "resting" upon said broken toilet seat, I got my first chance at understanding just what it feels like to have a cow take a great big bite out of my backside. Oh! Luckily, the jaws of the mighty beast opened just wide enough for me after a scant few seconds and allowed me to extricate my throbbing posterior from its grasp.

Alas, I was not the only one to succumb to the bite of this rabid beast, and to say the least we all learned very quickly to lay a small section of layered toilet paper over the hungry fissure before resting any portion of our anatomy upon it.

I am ashamed to say that the replacement of this toilet seat took much longer than it should have. My parents bought us a new toilet seat for Christmas (ha, ha, thank you very much), but it was a wooden one. So, we had to exchange it, again at the local hardware store. My wife finally broke down and did that, and even installed it for me this past week. (Love you babes!) How nice was that?

So, now we have a brand new toilet seat once more.

One that doesn't bite.

And I LOVE IT!