Another fine DIY job

Once, a couple of years ago, as I may have already recounted on these pages, while trying my hand at repairing the very same toilet featured in today's blip, I managed to superglue my finger to my penis.

I don't think I need to go into the details of how it happened, other than to say that needing to combine bodily functions while being in the middle of repairing a toilet seat with superglue is not a good idea. Since this incident, Mrs. Ottawacker has looked at me askance whenever I suggest that something might need repairing. It's as if she doesn't trust me.

"I'll do it," she usually says, looking at me with that peculiar mixture of love and tenderness she reserves for my less practical ideas. 

So, today, when the flushing handle to our ancient toilet snapped in half, I thought I would surprise her by gluing the two parts together again. So I quietly crept downstairs to the secret cupboard in the basement in which Mrs. Ottawacker has hidden the superglue. (I accidentally found it three weeks ago while looking for the Penguins she had hidden, and have been itching to use it ever since.)

However, I had counted without Mrs. Ottawacker's innate sixth sense picking up on the silent way I was negotiating the stairs.

"What are you doing?" she called from the office bedroom. "You're not... you're not REPAIRING something are you?"

"Well," I blustered. "The flusher handle snapped off inside the cistern and I was just going to glue the two bits together again. Won't take a second. Otherwise we'll have to use the downstairs loo."

"You were going to glue the two bits together again?" she repeated, somehow more slowly and venomously than I had imagined possible. "In the middle of a pandemic?"

"It'll be fine," I said.
"No it won't," she said.
"Yes it will," I said.
"No it won't," she said. "You'll get your head stuck inside the cistern or something and have to go to hospital. Leave it to me."
"But... " I protested.

So up she got from her work and trotted down to the basement, found a pair of the latex gloves the district nurse had to worn to give me injections when I had my hip replaced 15 years ago, and trotted back up, brandishing the gloves in a way I had not seen since I last went to the doctor's for my annual check up.

"What are they for?" I asked, not certain of wanting to know the response.

"They stick to the plastic, not your hand," she said. "Then, if you do get stuck, we can take the gloves off and not have you sitting on the toilet with your finger glued to it waiting for the pandemic to end before I call the firemen to come and get you out. Don't you ever think of these things?"

Admittedly, I don't. So instead of having her stand there and watch me while I did the basics, I handed her the glue and flounced out of the bathroom in my most "wounded artiste" style, saying "You do it then." She'd only have put me off...

So she did do it. And while no parts of her body stuck to the toilet cistern, I am delighted to report that the two bits of plastic didn't stick together either. So Mrs. Ottawacker had to call up our local Home Hardware (Canadian Tire has been boycotted since those stupid commercials a decade ago), described what we needed, drove out to get it, got it, installed it, and cleaned up all within the space of half an hour.

She really is very capable at stuff like that.