Oh what to say about, do with this year, this 2020?

Pretend it never existed? Or just bid it a not-so-fond farewell?

It was an exhausting year, politically (can you believe President Trump’s impeachment was earlier this year? Seems like a million years ago), health-wise (coronavirus/COVID-19/vaccines/mask battles), work-wise (in Jan. 2020 did most people know what Zoom was? No – but today it’s a verb) and so on.

Coronavirus alone shifted the landscape of this year, affecting sports, entertainment, dining, retail, employement and just general interactions with others. It also helped make – at least in the US – a toxic political divide even more divisive (see: masks, wearing).

Personally, this was a coronavirus year, so I didn’t much do anything. No vacation, no celebrations.

This was the Year to Do Nothing as much as possible. As I’ve noted many times before, it’s easier for me – a non-social animal – to pull this off; I understand the others champing at the bit to get back out there. But don’t do it!

I read a bit more this year than in years past, a good thing. Two highlights:

• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. This non-fiction book equates black/white relations not as simple (?) racism, but as a caste institution, as in India or – more recently – the brief but brutal caste system in Nazi Germary in the 1930s and 1940s. Powerful
• The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton. A subtle yet disturbing novel about mother/daughter husband/wife relationships. I kept trying to guess where it was going. But didn’t see that happening. Still haunts me. Hamilton, with this book and A Map of the World, is becoming a favorite.

No music, TV show or movie really grabbed me this year. I’m still struggling with how to find music these days. The new (to me) stuff that I find and buy usually comes from music in movies or TV shows.

For me, a forgettable year.

Let’s do better 2021….

One of the joys (is there a sarcasm tag??) of owing a house is that one gets to do all those fun home repairs: gutter cleaning, raking autumn leaves, caulking and so on.

But there is one bucket of home repair that, to me, is a special hell: Bathroom or plumbing repairs (often a two-fer!).

Finished up a bathroom repair an hour or so ago, and it seems pretty straightforward: Replace a toilet seat.

Trivial – remove the nuts from the two screws, install new seat and tighten bolts.

But this house is always an adventure when it comes to repairs. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had a repair person out and they said something in the vein of, “Huh! I’ve never seen that done that way before!” Which is exactly what you want to hear when you’re getting charged $XX an hour and you need, say, heat or hot water.

Anyway, the issue here was the bolts holding the seat to the toilet. Plastic nuts with 1/4-inch top flange, and about an inch or so plastic sleeve as part of the nut.

OK…

But it was on a bare metal – not brass, zinc- or brass-plated metal, or plastic – bolt.

And the plastic had, over the years, essentially fused to the bolt.

And with the toilet tucked close to the wall on one side, tough to access/see/remove the one bolt.

Basically, I had to remove the sleeve a little at a time, like picking at a scab on your knee when you were a kid. And then destroy/remove flange (which actually prevented the seat from being removed).

Slow, painful, awkward.

The “easy” bolt probably took three hours (total) to remove; the tough one took roughly double that. And the area around the toilet was strewn with just about every tool I own in an attempt to coax the plastic off the metal.

Just to replace a frickin’ toilet seat!

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

At the same time, a sense of accomplishment…progress, however incremental!