Best Seat In The House

Things never break alone.  Things also never break at convenient times.  This is especially true of the things essential for living in and maintaining a home.  For example, air conditioners never stop working on the coldest day of the year nor do furnaces suddenly cash in their chips in the middle of July.  For years I've pondered the reasons for those two irrefutable facts without arriving at anything resembling a reasonable explanation.  And if the air conditioner stops working it is a certain bet that something else will break down within a matter of hours.  That something else may be as large as the water heater or as small as the blender but, and you can go to the bank on this one, something will stop working.
Having carried this truth in my DNA all of my life, I wasn't a bit surprised today to notice that a lamp shade had somehow extricated itself from its frame.  Right after I noticed this minor and manageable situation I went into the bathroom to discover a broken toilet seat.  Well, more specifically, I noticed that one flange connecting the seat to its cover had torn in half.  While the lamp shade could wait, the toilet seat could not.
This just in.
They don't make toilet seats like they used to.  I'm not talking about changes since the invention of of the toilet back in 2800 B.C.E. give or take a few years though the similarity between those devices and today's water efficient, ergonomically designed toilets is pretty striking.  Clearly the folks living in Mohenjo-Caro (Mount of the Dead) knew a few things about cross word puzzles and comic books.
No.  I'm talking about the changes in toilet seats during the past five years or so.  First problem was that I couldn't figure out how to get the thing off of the toilet.  There seemed to be no place for my nifty pipe wrench to attach to anything.  I bought the thing for just this purpose because nothing less than a big pipe wrench or plastic explosive could budge previous broken toilet seats from their moorings.  That is until I stared at this morning's seat.  It seemed to be mocking me as I held my now impotent pipe wrench.  Then I noticed the magic words 'locked' and 'unlocked' starring at me from two knob type things fastened to what should have been hinges.  I turned the knobs and lifted.  The seat and lid came off.

Next step seemed clear.  Take broken toilet seat and broken lamp shade to nearest hardware store, find exact matches, purchase, and return home with new and hopefully unbroken stuff.
The fact that we here in LaLaLand are hunkered down in yet another heavy rain storm (or cell as they are now called speaking of changes) should have been enough of a reason for me to stay home but I had already picked up the gauntlet thrown at my feet by my house.  So into the rain I ventured with broken lamp, broken toilet seat, and - of course - picked up gauntlet and headed to Virgil's Hardware Store, Glendale's home of everything you need to fix a home.
It's not easy walking around a crowded store carrying a broken lamp shade and a broken toilet seat.  Luckily I left the glove in the Jeep.  The good news is that most store employees pretty much knew right away what I needed.  The bad news is that lamp shades are harder to find than toilet seats.  The really bad news is that neither makes a good umbrella.
The toilet seat was easy to install thanks to all of the changes made throughout the years.  I may not replace the lamp shade.  I'm thinking that if there's always one broken thing in my house then in the future things will only break one at a time.
Sometimes you just have to out smart tradition.