Unfortunately, the highlight of the week was a problem with my toilet. Work was fine, exercising was good and I ended the week with a fun, yarny day trip but mid-week was all about my toilet.
Now I had the entire guts of my toilet replaced in October right before my knee replacement so all should have been fine, except for the perennial problem of not having a water shut off on my toilet. Anyway, when I flushed the toilet Tuesday night, little did I know that the float would fail, leaving the toilet running. This would normally not be a problem but apparently the overflow pipe in my toilet is too tall so the hole by the handle is lower. I figured this out when I found my bathroom floor flooded just before bedtime.
The toilet was flushing fine but then the water just ran and ran, never turning off so it was slowly dripping out of the handle hole. I cleaned up the flood and lowered the water level before sitting down to YouTube to try and figure out how to fix it. At 11:00 p.m., I gave up and texted Donna, who was still awake and said she'd have her husband, who was asleep, call me first thing. I went to bed with a bin under the handle hole, figuring I'd get up periodically during the night to empty the bin and flush the toilet to get the level down. Only after I was in bed did I realize that the overflow pipe was plastic and all I'd need to do was hack enough off the top to get it below the level of the handle hole. It would run all night but at least not flood. I couldn't get a saw in there so I got an old pair of wire cutters and started hacking away at the pipe. I thought I had it low enough only to hear water hitting the bin after I'd be in bed awhile so I was back up hacking some more. It was a late night but I finally got it low enough that the running water was going down the pipe instead of onto my floor. I was able to sleep for 5 hours before the alarm went off.
Of course when I flushed the toilet the next morning, it stopped running. Ed called at 6:30 and said he'd still stop after work to check it out so I agreed to hit Menard's and buy one of every part he might need in the plumbing section. I went off to work tired but with the toilet not running. I was home with plumbing supplies in hand at 5:30 and after several flushes, it still wasn't running. I snacked my way through the kitchen while waiting for Ed to show up, only to call him before 7:00 and tell him not to bother to come. He suspected it might have been some little speck clogging something because they'd been doing water main work in Wahoo. Whatever. I was just happy that it was no longer running and I could relax and go to bed early. A week later, it's still fine and I need to return all the plumbing parts I bought before I forget about them.
On the cat front, I started back feeding my campus cats on Wednesday, which felt a bit overdue but I had waited until there was little chance of snow and ice to slip on. Now I could keep my eye out for Tweaker to make sure he was being accepted back into the colony. All good.
I thrifted alone on Thursday and found tons of yarn, including some rare as hens' teeth sock yarn - with labels no less! I also got a bunch of acrylic for my sister and a few skeins of bright yarn for Dawn's afghan. All good. I didn't know that Layton's mom had died and so he had gone back east until I went to find him Friday at lunch. Since I wouldn't be eating out, I decided to run errands. Unfortunately I neglected to remember the 1:30 meeting on my calendar so when I ran long at lunch, I left 4 people waiting for me in the conference room. Busted! I arrived at 1:50 and was starving because I had bought lunch at Whole Foods as my last stop. I made it through the meeting and ate at 3:00. I swam after work and then had Saturday snack supper on Friday (cheese and crackers, olives and shrimp with cocktail sauce along with a Guinnesss) because I wasn't all that hungry after such a late lunch. It was a nice end to the work week.
And the weekend had a nice start too. Erica had won a $50 gift certificate at Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle from an online contest and I had my $25 for the best socks at the state fair so we'd scheduled a trip to Stromsburg for Saturday morning. I was up for breakfast in the town's cafe before the yarn shop opened at 10:00 so was on the road before 8:00 to pick up Erica and drive another 45 minutes to Stromsburg. We had a lovely breakfast (a huge pancake, 2 eggs and a side of meat for $5.61 each - gotta love small town cafes!) and were at the yarn shop at 10:00. I managed to spent almost $150 beyond my gift certificate and then we hit Stromburg's wonderful grocery store (a gem for a small town) before heading home via Seward to hit the Mennonite thrift shop. We stopped at Starbuck's in York for yummy drinks and were laughing so much that another customer commented, nicely, about it. We had fun in Seward before heading back to Erica's, where I got the tour of their new acreage. I was home in time for tea with a pile of new yarn to stash on Ravelry. Fun fun!
Sunday was chores, as always, but I also did a bunch of cooking to be ready with healthy food for the week and made a dent in the produce in the fridge. Somehow in digging for kidney beans for 3 bean salad, I ended up cleaning out and organizing the can cupboards. I never did find the kidney beans (I used cannellini beans, which made for a bland looking salad) but went through all the other cans, both upstairs and then down when I took some extras to my overflow cupboards in the laundry room, finding a few to purge (they're waiting to be emptied so I can recycle the cans) and a few to use soon. At least that was one productive thing I got done beyond laundry and cooking. And the toilet was still fine so I'm calling it good, along with the rest of the week.
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