8/7/06
To all my dear friends and relatives who've been sending tentative inquiries as to my state of health and/or whatever: don't worry -- I haven't died or gone to Cuba or anything. I've just been having a life.

There's nothing wrong with living online that a little living offline won't cure. I was the recent recipient of a large can of motivational whupass, wha knows from where, opened up and dumped all over my head. I utilized the gift as efficiently as possible, rarin' back and letting fly on several backordered household tasks. Previous excuses like no time and no money were bravely sidelined whilst I sprayed debt like a fireboat on parade and ignored lesser duties like posting on my pathetic little cobwebby personal online site which isn't a blog. (Blogs are evil. You heard it here first.)

One of the pristine events of our last glorious appearance at Oregon Country Fair was an after-show visit to the wood-fired bathhouse. As esteemed performers, S and I were given the full VIP treatment, complete with an accessible stall. We took a shower together for the first time in years, and it left us rockin-ready for a revision in our own bathing facility, This consisted of Petunia, a huge beloved clawfoot tub of uncertain age which I'd penuriously and precariously installed in our remodeled-for-wheelchair bathroom back in the dawn of the 21st century about five years ago. S had long since demonstrated the disfunctionality of the arrangement, but I'd been dissuaded from revising the plumbing by my cringing fear of messing with anything that even kinda sorta works, especially if it involves water.

What finally emboldened me to take the leap (apart from Whupass In A Can) was finding a fiberglass access shower stall module in pretty good shape for a hundred bucks (about a tenth of the usual cost) at our favorite used building materials yard. My primary interest was in the floor portion, since after considerable investigation I was not yet comfortable in becoming a Mud Man and trying to pour my own shower pan, and the next cheapest solution was in the 300 dollar range. I slapped plastic and squeezed the little elephant into the back of our newly-acquired minivan, butching it ruthlessly down to fit my bathroom and hauling it up the back deck and through the bedroom slider because it was too fat to fit through any of the other doors. As well, I escorted dear old miz Petunia and her gilded little trotters right out through the kitchen, irregular skid marks on the crummy linoleum denoting her passage, and sat her out in the yard.

Carefully and frugally installed, the new stall served its immediate purpose in giving S somewhere to clean up without having to twist her broken leg into a pretzel. But the bathtub in the yard seemed nothing but an obdurate nuisance, constantly standing in the way of every task I attempted in her vicinity. S and I debated her fate: I imagined her having a pinch of value as an antique, however rusty and decrepit, while S thought she would make a dandy planter.

I finally scooted her into a somewhat less brutally obtrusive location and tore into the next task on my to-do list, a major defrag of nasty leftover firewood and building materials long since returned to its maker crusting up my front yard. A week of grubby labor went by. And then I was busy finishing up a dump run late one afternoon when I realized that the tub had disappeared.

When exactly had she left? It seemed uncertain. She was there, then she wasn't. The only circumstance less likely than my inability to notice the absence of a five foot clawfoot tub was that a couple desperate criminals (it would have taken two) had snuck into my yard by night and lugged her away. Perhaps she just fell through a crack in the probability field, sucked away into a different universe where I wasn't being quite so anal and cleanly. In any event, she was gone.

We filed a police report and received a case number (#06-324314), but I don't expect to ever get any postcards from the poor old thing. She was obviously ready to go find more appreciative owners. Hopefully whoever finally inherited her (undoubtedly some clueless yup trying to offset the overweening mortgage on their overweening new McMansion by going for decoration on the cheap) gets more out of her than we did.

Still, I can't help recalling the old Alan Sherman parody of If I Were A Rich Man, in which he imagines building the ultimate skyscraper,

I'd have a ladies room and also a men's room
Right there on each and every floor
Each one in a style that is apropos
And like the bathrooms in the best office buildings
you'd need a key to open up the door
Though who would steal a bathroom?
I dunno!