Do you know what makes a spectacular calamity at 6:45 in the morning? A 96-year-old, 6-gallon wall mounted toilet falling off the wall and pulling the water supply line with it.

After almost a century of handling this home's business, and I mean all of its business as we are a single-bathroom home, it took little more than the steam from the equally ancient shower Aleo had just turned on to have the final bolts let loose of its grip on the subway tile and come crashing atop the seat (which also broke in spectacular fashion).

While we were saddened to lose this storied part of our home, Marty and I are thankful for the opportunity to install our replacement toilet ourselves (with encouragement and help from a co-worker of Marty's--super-Kyle). While we love our new toilet (and that WE installed it), the home's original will be missed, but not forgotten. This remembrance will be assisted by a photo collage hanging over our toilet of Marty, Bella, Alex, and Anthony all using it (not at the same time). This picture-set usually elicits a few questions from guests in our home, which I will take a moment to answer here.



Why do you have pictures of everyone in your family using the toilet?
Because Marty would not let me decoupage our bathroom walls with pictures of bathrooms from around the world, which is something I have thanks to my Everyman Photo Contest. Fact is, once the Everyman took off and I had tens of thousands of photos to choose from, I had a vision of collaging our entire house with pictures of each part of the house. Meaning, our stairwell would be a collage of staircases. Our bedroom would have been a collection of bedrooms. And our bathroom, logically, would have people using the bathroom from all over the world. When Marty blocked that, emphatically so, our compromise was having pictures of the people that use our bathroom, using our bathroom. Though Marty would probably challenge the use of the term "compromise" in this situation.

Why do you even have pictures of your family on the toilet?
Because I take pictures of people doing everything. For Example.

Why isn't there a picture of you, Troy, included?
Because it is only a four-picture frame so mine wouldn't fit ;-) The real answer is there used to be, but the frame fell and was damaged and just never got put back up. But that picture does exist.

Couldn't you have thought of a more subtle and elegant way to honor the toilet?
Probably.