The Nose Bowl

Yesterday started off on a bad note. J woke up to the "glug glug glug" of me repeatedly pouring water down the sink from two little water bottles while muttering obscenities about the incompetence of toilet bowl manufacturers.

See, I have this habit of using toilet paper to blow my nose and then flushing it down the toilet, since this seems to me to be more sanitary than having dirty tissues sit in a wastebasket for a week.
Over the past couple of days, I have been battling some kind of no-you-can't-take-any-medication-for-it-because-you're-pregnant illness and my nose had been a particular distraction the night before.

Basically, I was up all night tossing crumpled toilet paper into the toilet. But I couldn't flush the toilet because I was afraid it would wake up J. Not once did it occur to me that the repeated sound of the foghorn attached to my face could disturb him. But I just knew that if I flushed that toilet once behind two closed doors, his sleep would be ruined for the rest of the night. Go figure.

So in the morning, I had amassed quite a mound of unflushed tissues in the toilet bowl, and had a sneaking suspicion that the toilet might choke on it when flushed. But that was a theory that had to be tested.

WHAT I DID NOT TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION, HOWEVER, WAS THAT EVIDENTLY THERE IS AT LEAST ONE TOILET BOWL MANUFACTURER WHO DOESN'T THINK IT'S IMPORTANT TO MAKE THE BOWL BIG ENOUGH TO HOLD ALL THE WATER IN THE TANK.

Toilets clog. That's just part of their job, and a fact of life. WHY then, would anybody make a toilet that overflowed when it couldn't get everything down the tube??? Even at our old crummy house, the water would stop flowing into the toilet if it backed up to a certain level.

I watched as the water rose. And rose. And kept rising. It didn't stop. It just kept coming, up, up, and out of the bowl. And onto the floor.

And furthermore, WHY WOULD ANY HOME MANUFACTURER INSTALL CARPET IN THE TOILET AREA???

I mean seriously people, what if this had not been toilet water and tissues, but the result of a seafood dinner gone bad? Our bathroom area would have been ruined for good and we would have had to get the flooring replaced because that kind of thing never REALLY comes out of carpet. It's like putting carpet in the kitchen - something anybody with a brain just doesn't do.

Anyway, after layering the floor with towels, I realized that the only way to lower the level of the water in the bowl was to take it out myself. Since we just moved in, all I had at my disposal was a couple of empty water bottles. Hence J's morning wake-up music.

I can tell you that this particular start to the day, in addition to my lack of sleep the previous night didn't do wonders for my mood or my cold, which grew gradually worse through the day. I eventually had to leave work just to go home and get some sleep.

Ah sleep. The wonder-cure. Much better today.