Quote of the Day, 22:

"That's how you know you did a really good job: You have pieces left over."
-- Me.

That's what I explained to The Boy after I successfully, and on the first try fixed the downstairs shower this afternoon. It had devolved into an unholy mess down there: it never fully shut off and the water temperature was uncontrollable, resulting in this morning's near-shower, in which I tried in vain to wash up in a scorchingly-hot trickle that ran down the side of the shower.

So this afternoon, hopped up on a giant peanut-butter-chocolate Easter egg, I turned off the water, de-installed the old shower handle and shower head, drove out to the hardware store and picked up new fancy shower parts -- you know, the kind of shower parts that would be used by English royalty if English royalty got their shower parts at Home Depot -- and got them installed, all in less than 2 1/2 hours. (Two hours, 24 minutes, to be exact. But traffic was bad.)

And the shower worked and I didn't, as it turned out, need to use the stuff that Home Depot tried (and failed) to sell me, the caulking-paste kind of stuff that warned that the vapors were extremely flammable. How flammable? The word spontaneous was used on the label, and the label also warned not to use in an area where there's electric ventilation because the electric ventilation can set it off.

I didn't need to use that, but I did want to buy it. Only I worried about how I'd get it home.

I did have some parts left over, too, but that's normal for one of my fix-it projects, and it seemed fair, since I used, on this one, some of the parts that were leftover from the last project.