Ross the Plumber

When you install a toilet, you actually place it directly on top of the finished floor, not against the subfloor.
The reason I point this out is because when I moved into my house, I had to cut about an inch off of the bathroom door. This is because years upon years of flooring had been installed without mining though previous generations. The floor in my bathroom is sheet vinyl. Under that sheet vinyl is vinyl tile. Under that, I believe, is a strata of linoleum, and beneath that, I dunno, maybe dinosaur fossils or spam or something. At the lowest layer is pine, which was the original floor of the entire house. As far as I can tell, the pine is still in fine shape, but many of the other layers have started to deteriorate. The result of this is that over the past few years, my toilet has started to cant to the right. A full repair of this is going to require reflooring the entire bathroom, a task I plan to undertake as soon as Leah and I can sort out exactly how we want it to look.
Unfortunately, though, earlier in the week, the tilt reached a point where it damaged the seal where water goes into the tank. Since this was kind of an urgent repair, I decided to go ahead and do it straight away rather than waiting for the weekend. So, I removed the supply pipe to the toilet, replaced the cracked plastic nut, and reattached everything, checked for leaks, and, right around eleven PM, Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I pulled myself out of the toilet.
And so did America.
Not bad for a night’s work.
Addendum: Proposition 8 is up in California. In a hundred years, teachers are going to be explaining how the same day we elected our first African-American president, we also voted to officially declare a whole class of citizens to be inferior and took away the right to marry which they had enjoyed for several months. Teachers will stress the irony of this. The students will probably think that Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama were childhood friends,