Our Twa-LAY

Well, here we are back again at it again.

The news flash from Balimawr is that our toilet, in our only bathroom, has reached a stage where it needs to be replaced.  We knew we were on borrowed time with the beast when we bought the house, but like an aging dog who keeps losing ground in its ability to hear, or see or even know its inside, so don't pee on the carpet, the toilet is finally where we are going to have to put it out of our misery.

And what is wrong with our throne?

Flush it and it runs like its in a marathon.  An hour can go by and its just runs and runs.  It used to take a long time, now it's at the point where it is self flushing.  And every hardware store that has sold us a new flush regulator, or a CorkyPlus flapper ("The red color tells you, its for hard water!") promising us that this would solve the problem has lied to us.

Quite literally, we've been flushing money down the drain trying to keep the "Jacuzzi" (a name the stirs images of swingers from the 70s getting stoned, all naked together, stewing in their own filth until they prune and pair up and copulate together, but not a toilet) in service.

And when the plumber came and looked at the toilet, his words were, and I quote: "There's your problem - that Jacuzzi toilet is nothing but crap."  But I think the pun escaped him. "Why did you put it in?"

I explained that we didn't - it came with the house.

"Man, I wouldn't have bought the house," sayeth he.  "What other corners did they cut? Pennies behind the fuses?"

When the husband and I redid the bathroom in Columbus, I bought a TITAN by Eljer, and it was close to $300.  The husband thought I was crazy. But I went to the plumbing supply place with an inquiring mind.  I wanted the best damn toilet they had.  And the TITAN was the best damn toilet I ever owned.   And the husband discovered its charms.  Made in Ohio, misery on water, and it never clogged.  And the name, with our friends, was legendary.  

This time around, sadly, we're not getting a TITAN, even though Eljer catalogs have upped the ante with the TITAN IV.  We can't get one.  We can't even get a TITAN II or III.  EVIDENTLY, Eljer has been merged into American Standard.  So we can only get a Titan IV if we bought it through Menards, of which they are none on the east coast.

Oh, pooh.  Quite literally.

So our plumber is selling us, at cost, the best toilet on the market today, according to him.  And the name of said new throne?

"The AVALANCHE, by Gerber," sayeth he.

"The baby food people make toilets?"

"I get that all the time," he laughed.  "Plumber humor."

This from a man who taught me the phrase "Any tighter, and I'd have married it," when he installed our new boiler last fall.

Now, when I think of the stuff that moves through a waste pipe, I do not think of the stuff of avalanches - that white powdery stuff called snow.

But in his vernacular: "Oh, it handle a whole shit storm without any problems.  I guarantee it."  And true to form, Consumer Reports ranks this as the top flushing toilet they have reviewed.  And I can't get it cheaper than what he has it at.

Normally I would install said toilet, however because its our only house and the nearest real hardware store is miles away instead of around the corner, we're letting the plumber do it.

So Friday, that giant sucking sound that you may hear will be the AVALANCHE in our bathroom, flushing down our "cares and woes," so to speak.