I Maintain

I try to keep my mind out of the toilet, but with the fill valve hissing intermittently I felt compelled to use precious weekend free time in there to remove, disassemble and clean the inner components of my cistern. I felt like I should tackle it before it whistled and burbled all the way to Friday evening, and the toilet bowl risked the same fate as my smoke alarm.

Alas, I did not fix my fill valve, or my dripping shower, or my unlatching front door, or grease the chain in my garage. I even failed to replace the battery in my key remote, after buying the wrong size. Being an adult is a pain in the arse. Every weekend it feels like a struggle just to maintain the status quo. Backs get sorer, maintenance issues build up, and the handicap the following weekend is even harder. You sit there, covered in toilet water, wondering if this is supposed to get easier.

The answer is, probably. Five years is the longest I’ve spent living in/being responsible for the same house. If you ever pull apart or unscrew the back off of anything in this world you’ll most likely find an intricate collection of components with a maximum lifespan somewhere between two to ten years. In the same way that I can maintain my words, my computer, my diet after ten, twenty, thirty years of experience I bet that by the time I reach forty everything in my house will have worn, cracked, shifted or torn and I’ll have watched enough YouTube tutorials to find the solution (and then paid a professional to fix my attempt at it). And then the next time it happens I’ll know what to do. It won’t be so hard. I’ll be able to say, oh there’s probably dog hair in that, or, yup, there’s definitely dog hair up there.

Problem solved.