It’s Amazing What we Take for Granted

Today’s exciting event: installing a new toilet seat.

The neatest toilet seat I ever saw was in France. I was on a train. It was 1984. The restroom in my car had a seat with a spring in it. The spring kept the seat in the up position unless someone was sitting on it.

That was brilliant. No one likes to touch a public toilet seat, so men usually leave them down, and bad things happen. I am told that women like to hover over them, which also causes marksmanship errors. When the seat has a spring in it, both problems are eliminated.

Women probably hated the seat, but then women have a real entitlement issue in this regard. If one woman shares a house with 10 males, she will insist that everyone leave the seat down so she can sit down without looking. It’s a bad policy, but it seems to be universal. Anyway, I thought the seat was wonderful. I know what it’s like to share a bathroom with a man who doesn’t raise the seat.

The second-neatest toilet seat I ever saw was on a Japanese Toto brand toilet. The Japanese make the best toilets in the world. It’s actually a little sick, if you ask me. They go way overboard. They have seats that wash and dry you and do God knows what else. Anyway, the Toto seat did not bang into position when it was released. It fell slowly. The hinges were built so they applied friction on the way down. Genius.

I had to put a special seat and bars in my dad’s bathroom a few months ago. It was very recent. I signed him up for hospice service late in 2018, and they made suggestions. Now that he’s gone, the special equipment makes no sense, and it was hard to clean around. I replaced the seat with a slow-close job from Amazon. Apparently, the Japanese no longer have a monopoly. The manufacturer is not Toto. It’s Bath Royale.

I feel like there should be competing manufacturers named Journey, Foreigner, and Cheap Trick.

I give the Bath Royale people credit. They came up with a doozy. When you install the seat, it essentially aligns itself. When you want to clean, you push a button, and the seat pops right off.

It’s important for me to get the bathroom in order so I can fully accept what’s happening to my dad. If I left the handicap accessories there “just in case,” I would be fooling myself, and I would feel stuck emotionally, unable to inhabit my new role in life.

I suppose there is some possibility that his health might take a turn that would make it desirable to bring him home for his last few days, but I’m not going to leave things as they are just because of that. If it happens, I can restore the equipment in a day.

I use the master shower now, just to make myself move forward. I ripped out the flow restrictor, but it didn’t improve things enough, so I got a better shower handle from an upstairs bath and moved it to the master. I ordered a new handle which is supposed to be very good.

I don’t care about water flow. I have two wells and dozens of acres. My toilets and showers are going to have no impact on the local water supply no matter what I do.

It’s bad enough that my hipster washing machine doesn’t get clothes clean. I’m not putting up with substandard showers.

The people who like “high-efficiency” machines (deluded hippies at Consumer Reports) claim they get clothes cleaner. That’s far from true. It may be that they remove stains better, but that’s not the same thing as getting clothes clean. If you take a pair of poopy drawers and put them in a machine, and it smears the poo around really well and then leaves the diluted poo in the fabric, the stains will be gone, but the poo and bacteria will remain. If you wash a pair in an old-fashioned machine that uses a ton of water, you may end up with a tiny amount of poo pigment in a stain, but the generous rinsing will assure that there is virtually no poo anywhere else in the garment. Which pair would you rather wear?

Greenie washing machines don’t even get big loads wet all the way through. Try one and see. Put 6 bath sheets in the washer and turn it on. Chances are, the load will be dry in the middle when you’re done. If you’re washing things that are really offensive, it’s very bad when they don’t get wet. You’re just sending filth on a carnival ride, and then you’re putting it in your dryer, so it can coat the inside.

I found out how to defeat the problem with greenie washers. You use the “bulky” cycle. It’s typical leftist hypocrisy. You make a “green” product which doesn’t work, and then you add a feature that defeats the purpose yet makes the product function. It’s like low-flow toilets. You buy a toilet which uses half as much water, and then when you use it, you flush twice.

When you use the bulky cycle, the machine gives up and uses more water. Then it punishes you by refusing to spin it well, so you have to leave it in the dryer twice as long. Which consumes…more energy.

Greenies never seem to get anything right, yet their smugness and self-righteousness continue unabated.

I replaced 11 compact fluorescent bulbs in my ceiling recently. These are the curly bulbs Al Gore forced on us prematurely. They’re full of mercury, and they take around two minutes to start working. You go in a dark room, turn on the lights, stumble around in the dark, walk out, and turn off the lights. They’re worthless. My ceilings are at least 10 feet high, and my CFL’s were starting to crap out, so I had to get a big ladder and drag it from room to room. I only needed two new bulbs, but I was not about to get that ladder out 9 more times, so I threw all the others out, too. I replaced all the bulbs with LED’s. The LED bulb is the product Al Gore should have been patient enough to wait for.

The CFL’s have to be disposed of carefully because of the mercury. That means you have to make sure they’re hidden deep in a bag when you put them out with the regular trash. Virtually everyone puts them in the regular trash, so there is no point in making a drive to the special place where they take in scary garbage. If most people were disposing of CFL’s properly, I would, too, but since they’re not, my rigid observance of the law would accomplish nothing except to inconvenience me.

In the distant past, we waited for technology to improve before we abandoned tried and true ways of doing things. Not any more. We gave up incandescent bulbs and killed thousands of American jobs before we had a decent alternative, just so hippies could feel superior. LED’s were coming with or without input from greenies; the free market loves superior technology.

Imagine what it would have been like had we banned horses in 1895. Horses were considered unsanitary, and cars were the new green option. If greenies had been around back then, Americans would have been forced to buy a lot of really terrible cars or just walk.

To leftists, government coercion is always the first resort. They never wait for people to do the intelligent thing on their own.

I get cranky when I have problems caused by bad green technology. I acknowledge that. It’s exasperating, having a $1000 washer which is vastly inferior to a $400 washer made 20 years ago. It’s even more exasperating, knowing there are no good new washers. There is nothing I can do to get around the problem of the bulky cycle and moldy clothes, until engineers find a way to create an effective washing machine hippies can’t ban.

Anyway, the toilet seat is installed, and my high-flow shower handle is coming. It’s only a matter of time before I use that bathroom for everything. Eventually, I’ll use the bedroom as well.

I better get on the road. My dad will be finishing his dinner in about 35 minutes, and I haven’t seen him yet today. It’s best to see him an hour before a meal, so he will have something to do when I leave, or immediately after he eats, so he won’t be hungry and I won’t have to sit in the dining room while he finishes. It seems like they’re always eating. They have three meals a day, and bedtime comes early.