I spent half of yesterday hunched over the toilet. The water leak in the camp trailer turned out not to be a loose clamp on a water line like I’d hoped. Instead, it was the water valve on the toilet that was leaking, so I pulled the toilet out of the trailer and replaced the valve with a new one. The valve itself was $50, which seems ridiculously expensive, but it was something I couldn’t do without on such short notice. I found one online for $33, but couldn’t wait that long for it to get here. Removing and reinstalling the toilet was pretty difficult because of the confined space, but luckily I didn’t have any major problems (like I usually do when fixing any sort of plumbing). The worst part was that when I removed the floor bolts, I could only turn each one 1/8th of a turn before having to flip the wrench around and give it another 1/8th of a turn, then repeating it all over again dozens of times.
Today, I washed the mud off of the ATVs and changed the oil. I hate changing oil, and I thought an oil change on an ATV would be much easier than on a car, but that turned out not to be the case, at least not at first. When I removed the oil filter cover on my machine, oil puked out all over the side of the engine and pooled up in the footwell. When I did Traci’s machine, I cut a plastic cup to fit under the oil filter cover so I wouldn’t have the same problem on hers. There’s not much room under there, and the cup was barely big enough to hold all the oil that came out when I removed the cover. I changed Traci’s oil in half the time it took to do mine, and I didn’t spill a drop the second time.
I also cleaned all the dried mud off the driveway today. It’s been at least a year since I cleaned the driveway, and there were several different colors of mud caked on the concrete. I filled a 3-gallon bucket to overflowing with dirt that I scraped from the front 25 feet of the driveway. There’s that much or more mud still caked on the truck, which I haven’t washed in probably two years–I’ll get around to that one of these years.