cabin cruisers, submarines and toilet seats

Today is an odd day.

First, just when the whole "I-must-have-big-boat" thing starts to fade, I got a truly lovely and thoughtful reply to an email from, I don't know, like last year, from Islander, with a wealth of extremely useful information about boats, including the notion that I should name mine "Grace" after my dear aunt, who it seems has remembered me in her will.

Damn you Islander! The notion was actually starting to fade.

But I was thinking more "Grace & Johnnie," though, in honor also of the uncle I never met. hobbitt and I had vanity plates on our New Joy Sea cars with my mother's and father's initials on them. So, what the heck. Why name a boat druid labs afloat or Three Hour Tour when one can honor someone else entirely! And I am serious. Though Three Hour Tour is still my favorite even though I'm sure it's been done to death.

Forget everything I just wrote. I'll name any boat I might get Damn You Islander.

So on the way to the store, to get a damned Bemis Alesio toilet seat, I was stopped for about a half hour waiting to go over the Hood Canal Bridge as it was open for marine traffic. I was about 3/4 mile away from the bridge, high on the hill, and I could see the waterway. Now I've been stopped like this several times, while heading in each direction, and I've never actually seen any marine traffic. But that's okay because as I was sitting there, less than an hour away from being yelled at by a Home Depot clerk, I saw a submarine heading out to the Sound.

A SUBMARINE!

Lucky for me I've been keeping the field glasses in the passenger door pocket, so I whipped them out and got a real good look at this sleek behemoth. I'm not exactly a hick but I have never, ever before seen an actual, real-live, active sub under way. It was the coolest thing. Plus, it made me think of a blogger friend with whom I share a wicked sense of humor and a love of all things food. Bo! Wow. You were on one of those amazing contraptions. That had to be a major blast, as well as all those other things you write about that time of your life, like hard work and extreme danger.

Okay. The toilet seat. We somehow broke a bumper off a cheap toilet seat this weekend, so yesterday I went to Home Depot to replace it. They had the same model we have in the master bath and that one is quite nice, so I brought it home. Turns out I bought the round one and not the elongated one that we actually need. So today I went back (and mind you, this is a 25-mile drive to get to the nearest Home Depot) and as it turns out, they have none of the elongated seats. So I asked the very attractive and quite helpful older gal who was helping me if I could purchase the display model. She took it off the shelf for me only to realize that the plastic flange that goes between the chrome hardware and the porcelain of the toilet, was missing. As she went off to get a "mark down" approval from a manager for me, I allowed as how the toilet seat was useless to me without the flange. The custom, non-standard flange.

"You're kidding me. I just disassembled the display for you!" she hissed at me, through clenched teeth.

"Yes, and I do appreciate it, but you must understand that this seat is of no use to me if I don't have all the parts."

She stomped off in a huff and though I stood around for about 20 minutes waiting for her to return, she never did. Hey! This was a discontinued model. I was going to offer to pay full price if she could get me the hardware components from one of the round models. I stood in line for another ten minutes or so to speak to the manager to a) complain about the verbal abuse and b) ask about the hardware. I think the manager was flossing his brain or perhaps taking an extended newspaper break while sitting on a Bemis Alesio toilet seat, so I dropped the seat on a shelf and left the store.

Okay, it's four hours after I left the house, in search of a toilet seat. I just found it on-line and ordered it. Maybe I'll get lucky.

And I feel like I need a drink.