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Today was a bad-weather day-- intermittently rainy and foggy-- so I decided it would be a good day to call a plumber and see if I could get our leaky toilet fixed. This problem's been building up for quite a while, but between work and my mother's various appointments, I hadn't found an opportunity to do anything about it.

I called around 9 this morning, and then had to wait another two and a half hours before I heard anything back. (I didn't find the wait as dull or frustrating as I have in the past, because I spent most of the time talking to Chantal and checking out random weird threads in the Music forum.) When the van arrived and the plumbers came to the door, they could've been a duo from a buddy comedy: one was a loud, blustery New Yorker and the other was a soft-spoken Southern guy, and they bickered constantly while they were doing the job, though in such a way that it was clear they really got along just fine-- this was simply their standard behavior.

The problem was that, every time I flushed the upstairs toilet, water leaked in a steady drip into the kitchen directly below. When they couldn't find the leak from upstairs, the plumbers decided they had to cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling to locate it. Fortunately, my mother had anticipated they'd need to do something in that part of the room, and we'd already moved all the junk that was sitting on the counter onto a folding table we put up in the center of the room. Unfortunately, the counter itself is bolted to the wall, so there was no way to move it and make the plumbers' lives a little easier. But that didn't seem to impede their progress in the slightest.

They found the leak, then had to actually move the toilet and reseat the water tank in order to fix the problem. This was when they did the most bickering; but they got the job done in a little more than an hour. The total damage: $243. The work's not done yet-- the plumbers aren't trained in drywall repair, so we had to call a handyman to patch up the hole; he can't come until Monday, and because he charges a minimum fixed rate no matter what the job, plus materials, that part of the work will probably cost more than the toilet repair. But at least the leak is fixed, and I can actually flush the toilet without worrying about what's going to happen downstairs.

By the time the work was finished, my mother was more than ready to get out of the house; she can't stand to stay in the entire day, no matter how bad the weather. So we went to lunch at Peking Restaurant, the only combined Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian barbecue buffet I know of, and shopped a little at the Kmart next door. I found two surprising bargains in their video game section-- Haunting Ground for $15, and the PSP version of Gottlieb Pinball Classics for $10. biggrin