picture

guess I should quit hot-linking my profile pic.

again!

and now I type some more to see how this one looks. lots of white space, but it looks better than the cropped pics

and more

love maps

more pictures

Pictures

here is where I write enough to see how far over the margins go. I want it to be centered under the image. this looks okay.

More Images

Over at the real blog, we're thinking about altering the format a little. Studiodave wants it to look less like a stock template, so he's asked a friend to help us jazz up the place. We don't want to do a bunch of experimental stuff on the blog while people are trying to read our awesome posts, so I figure I'll fiddle around here. Here's a couple more images uploaded in what really feels like the incorrect way.

Him Card Read Good

I ain't good at this web stuff, so I"m just going to put a picture in here so I have a link for it. I'm sure there's a smarter way, but here I am.

An American Dream

Some seek inner peace. Some seek money or property. Some seek power. I seek a comfortable toilet seat.

One of my most enduring memories of my 70s childhood is that of the cold-ass toilet seat in our bathroom. It was fine in the warm weather (which was most of the time in Raleigh, NC), but the winter months were brutal.

When I was in my early teens, we visited my great grandma in Lenoir, NC, and I found my grail: a padded toilet seat. Not only was it as soft as a Lazy-Z-Boy, but the vinyl covering was much more insulating (read: not cold) than the hard plastic seat I was used to.

I asked my parents (when it came to buying stuff, "asking my parents" meant "asking my mom") if we could get a padded toilet seat, but I already knew the answer: no. First of all, the toilet seat we had was just fine. Second, and more importantly, I was informed that padded toilet seats wore out quickly. No way were we getting a replacement seat every two or three years; who were we, the Rockefellers? (We certainly weren't, but neither were we the pre-Texas Tea Clampetts. My dad had a decent job in the state public health department.)

So the dream of a padded toilet seat remained a dream, and an unattainable one at that. People like me just didn't have luxuries like padded toilet seats. It wasn't until I met my wife that I began rethinking that belief. We were walking around the Home Despot one day and came across the toilet seat section. I saw a padded one and told her about my dream. She asked a simple question: "Why don't you get one?"

I was shaken to my very foundations. Could it be that, as an adult with my own job and apartment, I really could get that luxury seat? I recoiled from the thought. It will wear out! It costs too much! (The padded ones were around $25, whereas the regular ones started at $10.)

I didn't purchase a padded seat that day, but the seed had been sown. I figured that if the padded seats ever went on sale, maybe I'd get one. Since that time, about four years ago, I occassionally cast my eyes toward the toilet seat section in the Despot and other places we frequent (Target, K-Mart, Ross's). The damned things never went on sale. I guess it was just coincidence, but I began to wonder if there was some kind of worldwide conspiracy to keep us reg'lar folks from affording padded seats.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw one. In the clearance section at K-Mart. For $16.00. I checked to see if it was a cheapo, but it looked pretty good: it had solid metal hinges, and the materials seemed pretty substantial. It was sealed in plastic wrap, so I couldn't give it a thorough checking (yes, I would've tried to set it on a toilet in the store if I could have).

I bought it. $16.00 isn't a great price, but I figured it was about as cheap as I'd ever see, and that word "clearance" was pulsing in my brain. The siren song of the department store that word is. But there was another factor at play. The wife (we've been married for a couple years now) wanted to replace the seat in our bathroom because it had a small scratch in it. She's a germ-o-phobe to the nth degree. She feared that there might be toxins underneath the finish on the hard seat we had, and that those toxins would get into her through her butt. Yeah, it's crazy, but I love her.

I took the old seat off our toilet and installed the new one. The metal hinges looked nice, but they didn't seem as high quality as I thought they were. The seat also didn't sit completely straight on the toilet -- it seems the holes in the porcelain were drilled slightly off kilter, and this new seat had no way to compensate for that. The old seat, I noticed, had a complex attaching mechanism that allowed a good amount of adjustment, so you could get that sucker on straight even with messed up holes. (I realized at about this time that the old seat was pretty damned nice, even though it wasn't padded.)

I pressed on. The seat was a little off center, but it wasn't that bad. I tightened the bolts real good (had to use pliers; the old seat had nice big plastic lugs that could be easily tightened by hand). I lifted the lid and gave it a ride. Ahh, that felt nice. My "deprived" childhood flashed before my eyes. I was finally my own man. Okay, the materials weren't as fine as I thought they were and the seat didn't sit quite right on the toilet, but this was going to work.

As the days passed, however, I discovered more problems. I noticed how utterly shabby the lid was. It was padded, but inside the padding was a flimsy plastic sheet. You could sit on it (in the mornings I have to share the bathroom w/ the wife, so she gets to stand in front of the sink and I get to sit on the toilet lid behind her and to her left), but you had the feeling it would crack at any moment. Also, the lid sinks into the padding of the seat, causing the front end of the lid to depress while the back end, where the hinges are attached, stays higher up. You end up sitting at an angle, kind of like Costanza with his huge wallet.

Then the damned seat kept working loose. Those bolts just wouldn't stay tight. If you overtighten them you can crack the porcelain, so you have to be careful. I can't stand a loose toilet seat, so this flaw bothered me even more than the crappy lid.

I fancy myself a handy fella; the wife would probably disagree, but she usually humors my attempts at building and fixing. I've been trying to figure how I could improve the seat. I loved the experience of sitting on the soft, noncold seat, but I couldn't stand the lid and lousy attaching bolts. I thought fondly of the old seat, which I hadn't the heart to throw out, with it's hard, flat lid and firmly (but flexibly) attaching hardware. Then it hit me: could I somehow attach the soft seat to the hard lid? Could I replace the crappy hardware with the good stuff? Dare I attempt to challenge god and improve upon his creation? I felt I was striking through the mask, as Ahab did, and it didn't feel good. Correction: it did give me a giddy feeling of power, but I also recoiled from that power. Finally, I decided that I had to try it, thousands of years of toilet seat design be damned.

I made careful examination of the two seats (I hope to post pics of them soon). I found that yes, I could detach the old seat from its hardware and lid; in fact, the old lid and hardware were a single unit.

This brings us up to about last week. Today I began this ambitious project by detaching the old seat from it's partner. This was harder than I thought it would be, because the screws holding the seat on the hinge hardware were rusted off at the heads, and I couldn't get them off with a screwdriver. Finally I just drilled the damn things out with my little cordless drill/screwdriver.

Now I have to figure out a way to attach the padded seat to the hard lid. The hinge from the old seat screws into the back of the seat, but the padded seat doesn't have a hard surface for the screws to bite into. So I've got to somehow attach a hard backing to the padded seat before I can move on.

I will update as events warrant.