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My mother’s quitting smoking again and each time she does some basic skill set is temporarily lost until she feels nicotine-free.  This time, she warned me, it was her math skills and she’d been making numerical oopsies for the last four days.  She insisted that event tickets she bought for her and my dad reduced the amount of spousal support she was due rather than increasing it and after a dinner where I tipped $10 on a $50 food charge was met with “why the 50% tip?” I realized she was right.  After returning to my mother’s house:

Me: Happy day after mother’s day (that’s when we traditionally celebrate to avoid crowds).
Her: would you like to come in?
Me: I need to to use the rest room and I dare say your toilet is too…. dainty.
Her: Oh, ok then.
*I walk out, she sees me to the door*
Her: BE CAREFUL!

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While our tenants are theoretically renters we’ve very much taken a “you break it you bought it” attitude to home repairs.  One accidentally flushed a toilet bowl freshener which stopped up the toilet in ways that polyurethane foam couldn’t.  He attacked it for several hours with a combination of a plunger, a toilet snake, a trash bag, and a beer can (?) and I thought he was victorious.  Based on much loud cursing, a little sobbing, and a sticky note that said “DO NOT USE” affixed to the toilet I guess he wasn’t.

A day later, inspiration apparently struck as I was sitting at my computer and heard him yell “aha!” at 2 AM.  There was a flurry of activity that ended with what sounded like a shower and him returning to bed.  His triumph was confirmed by a new stick it note: “USE!!!”  The previous note had been moved to a roll of paper towels that were… browned.

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I hate the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic e-book reader.  I really have no qualm with the device I suppose but the model of licensing reading material and calling it a “book reader” smacks of consumer injustice.  But for health reasons I may need to get one.

I read on the can as most people of learning do.  I finished Robert R. Colton and Joel A. Palmer’s History of the Modern World largely on the toilet and some 3k of the 4.7k pages of the Dark Tower heptilogy were consumed on the crapper.  This habit has had long-term health effects though as I’m now reading the 1.3 kilopage tome The Codebreakers and my right wrist starts hurting after a few minutes.  This has never happened before and I fear it may endanger my ability to read books larger than a few hundred pages.

So I’m reduced to three options:
1) Buy an e-book reader
2) Eschew large text consumption on the john
3) Construct some ridiculous articulated lapboard to mount in the bathrooms of my house.

The answer is obvious; I have a battery of counterbalance potty tables to build.