Plumbing is hard

Who knew? (Plumbers, probably.) I spent all last night trying to get the tank off my toilet -- the floater had snapped off and needed to be replaced. The bolts kept spinning around as I tried to remove the nuts. By the time I removed the tank, I was too exhausted to do anything with it. But I'm determined to show this toilet who's boss.

Two toilets in the house became useless the other day: my floater snapped off, and the toilet tank upstairs started leaking. We wouldn't have known, but the water was accumlating in the ceiling of the kitchen, between the plasterboard and the paint. It was like the ceiling had a zit.

I'm reading The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 17th ed. Actually, I've sort of been reading short stories from all sorts of places: I'm also reading stories from Carol Emshwiller's Report to the Men's Club and Other Stories, McSweeney's, Say... and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and the occasional story online. I used to hate short stories, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I just hated short stories in the genre of literary fiction, where they tend to be less stories than they are sketches or portraits. Now I like them, because I can skip around from book to book (to zine, to the Internet), and I've read a complete work, even if I haven't finished the book. Plus, if you don't like one, you can skip it and not feel like a complete failure. There's the whole "sampler platter" factor when it comes to anthologies -- you get to find out what writers whose work you would like to read more of (which is how I became a fan of Kelly Link), as well as those that you have less interest in. This is, of course, assuming that the stories are worth reading in the first place (as they are in Trampoline and McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales).

Song: "B.O.B." by OutKast.