November 30, 2008

Am I an Uncle or a Plumber?

So I've gone a whole month without blogging... I don't even have a good excuse for it. School keeps me busy, but not that busy. Well there it is, I guess I'm just lazy.
Thanksgiving happened. I gave thanks, I partook of turkey, potatoes, four kinds of pie, stuffed myself with stuffing, etc. and then slept very well that night on a full stomach. The break was good, especially because I could feel good about lounging around doing nothing since it qualified as spending quality time with my family. We went bowling, did some taste testing at Costco, and relaxed in the new hot-tub. Good times.
The coolest part of seeing the family was getting to hold my new niece, Hunter Sapphire Hoyt Gandy. Yep, that's her name. She was born earlier this month and has been blessed with a full head of hair. Observe: What a good-looking uncle, I know (totally joking, I wish I wasn't though)! She's adorable, even when she's awake.
The other exciting thing that happened during the vacation at home was the assembly of the new toilet. Daniel and I tackled what the box said was a forty-five minute job, but spent most of the day trying to install the toilet. The problems started with dropping screws through holes in the floor, and then got really complicated when we buried an important gasket under the toilet that was supposed to go in between the bowl and the tank. Okay, I didn't read all of the instructions, but even when I eventually did they didn't make any sense.
If I had one thing to say to toilet manufacturers it would be this: Assembly instructions for toilets should be more like lego instructions and include pictures! Building a lego castle is far more complicated, but the instructions are 100x more intelligible.
In the end the toilet got installed, doesn't leek, looks quite nice, and I learned something important: I do not have an aptitude for plumbing.