Water, Water Everywhere

Newsletter 2026-02-23

Water has decided to become my sworn enemy in 2026. It could have been worse. Water is the weakest of the four classic elements. Nobody wants to fight fire, especially not with fire. If I have to, I’ll fight it with insurance claims. A few weeks ago, my kids left the exterior door to the basement open, and a hot water pipe froze and exploded. My father-in-law, Bob, saved the day, replacing the faulty line on a day when all travel was shut down by snow and ice. I hoped that would be my last run in with the wet stuff. Then I came home from work Friday. The utility company had left a note on my front door that said I had a water leak. That wasn’t how I wanted to start my weekend. It wouldn’t have been how I wanted to end it, either. The best time for plumbing problems is never. Too bad for me that mine always happen right now.

I didn’t know where the water was coming from. There were so many suspects. The leading one was the slow stream that always flows from the corner of my basement. All old houses should have an involuntary water feature. It adds to the charm and also the chances of complete structural failure. Years ago, I investigated that leak. I thought it was coming from a junction in a drainage line coming from both the furnace and the water heater. I called in a plumber, who concluded that the water was flowing not from the junction to the corner, but from the corner to the junction. The only buried pipe on the other side of that basement wall within the crawl space was the waste line from the downstairs bathroom. Panicking, we paid a company with a camera to rush out and investigate the pipe. Hundreds of dollars later, we found out there was no leak. All of our pipes were fine. The stream in the basement was from unexplained groundwater unrelated to any of our plumbing. I accepted that nebulous explanation due to a lack of viable alternatives and also because it didn’t require me to spend more money. I’ve been walking over that stream for years, boldly ignoring it under the assumption that it’s as inevitable as death, taxes, and AI enslaving us all. Then I got that note from the utility company and rethought everything. Maybe literally stepping over a problem without doing anything about it wasn’t the answer after all.

After reading the note, I went back into the basement. Nothing had changed. We still didn’t have any pipes that could be causing the stream. All of our lines are clearly visible on the ceiling of the basement and the adjoining crawl space. Bob’s recent work was also solid. As if he would ever do sub-par craftsmanship. He can do anything but fail. The stream has been active lately, but not to an alarming degree. It flows no matter how cold the surface of the earth might be. Like me, the freeze here is perpetually shallow. I admit it blows my mind that there’s somehow water flowing below my lawn year round. The house next door used to have a sump pump that emptied out through a pipe above ground. It would spit out water at random intervals, even when it hadn’t rained for days. I don’t understand how water can flow deep underground without washing away the dirt. Maybe it doesn’t so much as flow as soak. This entire block might be an aspiring swamp. Someday, the pesky humans will go away and this neighborhood can achieve its full potential by sinking back into the muck.

After dealing with that red herring, I returned upstairs. The water was leaking from somewhere else and it wasn’t ending up in the basement. Even more perplexing, it was a slow leak. The note said it was a loss of twelve gallons per hour. To me, that sounds like a rounding error. A standard shower uses 2.5 gallons of water per minute. If one person took an extra five minutes, we’d blow past that limit. With six people showering, it wouldn’t take much to shift the totals. Maybe it was a week when we were extra cold or extra stinky. Then again, the note meant that we were using the equivalent of those extra five minutes in the shower once an hour for twenty-four hours. It made me wonder how it was calculated. If the utility company just took the total, I don’t know how they could have detected it. Maybe I used more water this month to set up an ice skating rink in my backyard. You celebrate the Olympics in your way, and I’ll celebrate it in my. Our smart meter must show the utility company an hourly tally. If our rate never fell below twelve gallons an hour for any hour, day or night, it would be logical to conclude we have a leak of exactly twelve gallons. Either that or we have someone obsessively taking five-minute showers around the clock and never leaving the house. There are worse ways to spend February.

Stumped, I texted a plumber to see if he could come out over the weekend. My outreach was unnecessary. Minutes after my wife, Lola, got home, she figured out the problem: Our second-floor toilet keeps running. It’s leaking just enough water from the tank to the bowl that the tank has to refill a few times per hour. That explains the rate. I texted the plumber back to apologize for bothering him. “I’m sorry” is the most common start to my text messages. Knowing me is a burden. With the cavalry waved off, we investigated ourselves. Lola’s theory seemed plausible. Also, she’s never wrong about anything. My one concern was the timing. I wondered why the water company would reach out to us now when the toilet has been doing phantom refills for years. I didn’t realize it was doing it as often as they indicated. Perhaps our ghosts have upped their fiber intake. I’m glad they’re staying regular. Lola said she had messed with the cord inside the tank a few weeks ago, which could have jostled something and made it leak more. It was also possible that the water company simply hadn’t checked until now. Or maybe they knew all along but expected me to take care of it on my own like a responsible homeowner. They finally left a note not out of concern, but from exasperation. It shouldn’t be up to the water company to raise me right.

The fix was simple enough: We needed to replace the gasket in the tank, which wasn’t sealing completely. Lola suggested that we go ahead and replace all of the tank’s internals at once to eliminate any other faulty variables. Friday night, I drove to the hardware store and visited the toilet section. I didn’t realize that gaskets came in two-inch and three-inch varieties. Faced with the two choices, I agonized. Whatever option I choose is always wrong. But if I specifically pick what I think is wrong in order to be right, I’m still wrong. I’m highly skilled at outsmarting myself to the detriment of all. Regardless of my own personal failings, the first law of home renovations demands that all projects take at least two trips to the hardware store. If I did it in one, the universe would literally destroy itself. It would be like dividing by zero.

When we moved into our house, the very first thing we did was replace the toilets with new ones with maximum flushing power. I wanted something with the ability to tear an arm off. I was well aware of how I ate. I had no intention of dealing with clogs. In all our years in this house, I’ve only needed a plunger once or twice, and always when a child first discovered the joys of toilet paper. That would indicate a large opening. But I thought our toilets were powerful because the opening was big at the bottom, not because it had a bigger opening leading down from the tank. Besides, the three-inch flaps in the store looked huge. Surely our toilets didn’t have circus dimensions. I bought the two-inch version and went home. Sure enough, our toilets had three-inch openings. I should have known our home is, in fact, a clown world. I drove back to the store and bought the right size. That used up my free time for Friday night. I decided to get started with installation in the morning. The leak would have one more night to run amok wasting twelve gallons an hour.

The next morning, I did every chore on my list except installing the toilet parts. I always do the most important task last. That’s the ironclad code by which I procrastinate my life. I worked out, cleared the yard of pig poop, cleaned and refilled the troughs, and went to the grocery store. When I had all of the food for the week put away, I checked the clock. I still had an hour and a half before I needed to drive my thirteen-year-old, Mae, to her robotics competition. It was scheduled to last for five hours but would likely run longer. If I wanted to get the toilet fixed Saturday, I needed to rush to get it done right then. Never mind that if I had done it first, I wouldn’t have had to rush at all. Intermingled periods of stalling and panicking are the cadence by which I live my life. I seek balance by oscillating between opposite extremes.

I drained the tank and removed it from the back of the toilet. I was feeling quite accomplished. I hadn’t broken anything or hurt myself yet. That streak ended when I attempted to remove the tank o-ring seal, which screwed into the bottom of the overflow tube. I needed to turn it. I twisted with all the might my feeble fingers could muster. It wouldn’t budge. I went into the basement and grabbed the sharpest object on the planet: the shears I use to trim Gilly’s hooves. I cut through the ring and the plastic track it screwed into in two places. It still wasn’t enough. I took a flathead screwdriver and used it like a chisel, banging on the back of it with a rubber mallet. Finally, the part snapped off. The way was clear for me to install the new hardware. There was just one problem: I was almost out of time. I was in danger of leaving the toilet unusable all day. It was not a proud moment in husbanding.

Photo by Jas Min on Unsplash

I quickly installed the new outlet tube and o-ring seal. I put the back on the toilet and screwed it in. I added the refill tower. I started to fill the tank with water. Lola came into the bathroom. My earlier banging had rightfully alarmed her. Those weren’t standard plumbing sounds. It took her half a second to notice the tank was horribly askew. In my haste, I hadn’t noticed. It’s hard to tell what level even is in a house where everything is slanted. I made minor adjustments to the nuts on each side to even it out a little. It wasn’t enough. I was out of time. I ran upstairs to shower. Lola took over on the plumbing. Finally, an adult was in charge.

I hurriedly got ready and left with Mae. Her competition was just eighteen minutes away, which is basically next door by suburban standards. Any drive less than thirty minutes is almost walking distance. Lola stayed in the bathroom. She texted an hour later to say she had everything operational. Our ghost flushes are a thing of the past. As I type this at the robotics competition Saturday, I know I get to go home to a fully functional bathroom that doesn’t leak and that was expertly repaired by my beautiful wife after it was less-than-expertly repaired by me. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James