Small Showers Don't Last As Long As They Used To

Here is a picture of the shower in our new bathroom -- or, I should say, "newest" bathroom. It's been two years since we finished it, so it's no longer exactly "new." As you can tell by the mildew stains. Which I'm not going to show you.

Anyway (spake Zarathustra), cue the 2001 music:

Actually, it's less "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" than it is "Beam me up, Scotty" -- especially when the sun's still down and the exhaust light's on so it's all glowy like that.

And yes, that's a facecloth on the floor in front of it. I don't use facecloths, but I still fold them nicely and arrange them on top of nicely folded towels. Then, when I get in the pod-bay shower without anything to dry off with, and I have to reach around and out, the facecloth winds up on the floor, where it stays until I decide it's been kicking around long enough to be considered dirty. Then I wash it and the whole process starts again. Life, it's a cycle.

I did consider picking up the facecloth before I took the picture, but I decided I didn't feel like it and you'd probably never notice anyway. That was before I decided to spend a whole paragraph -- now two -- blathering on about the fact that it was there.

Here's the shower from another angle, this time inside the bathroom:

A really stupid angle, as it turns out, with me standing on the toilet holding my arm up in the air, and my first-thing-in-the-morning, still-sweatshirted boob there in the lower left hand corner. My second internet booby shot -- before you know it, I'll be Paris Hilton! (Actually, sadly, I'm more on my way to Lubbock Motel 6...)

Really this time, here's a better picture of the shower with the other lights on, so it doesn't look quite so transporter-ish. I meant to turn the exhaust light off, too, but I forgot. It's early, all right? And it was even earlier than this when I did it. Besides, I like the glowy.

It's a very small bathroom, about as small as one can legally be, but we wanted it to have a shower. It is, after all, the en suite in the master bedroom (pardon my french).

(I love using the phrase "en suite" in regards to this little washroom, in case you haven't noticed. When the Irish Girls stayed with us last summer, they were here for almost a month before they saw it. Johnny fell asleep on the toilet in the other bathroom and I had to usher them in here lest they explode. Sarah took one look and exclaimed "I wish I had an en suite!" and the expression just kind of stuck. Except she's a Dub, so it sounded more like "Oi wish oi had'n en sui'!)

Point is: bathroom's small. Needed a shower. Went shopping. Found this roundy. Fell in love. It cost more than the same-sized squares or triangles, but not much more (I don't recall, exactly), and I wanted it. I visited it for months before we had water or walls to hook it up to, and I decided I could have it. It made sense as a space saver, not just for it's roundiness but because the door slides around into itself so you don't have to leave room for it to swing... see?

Yeah. You can't see in that one. Hang on.

Okay. See?

(Those wooden shelves are where the towels go when there are clean towels. Or, rather, when all the clean towels are not still in a pile on the couch. And there, from another angle, is the famous facecloth.)

So I needed it. And when I was finally ready to go hand over money so they'd let me bring it home, lo and behold, it was on sale! Again, I can't remember how much cheaper it was or how much I paid for it (somewhere in the neighborhood of $400, I think), but I thought the sale was a sign from the porcelain gods that I had chosen wisely. Also a sign from more earthly beings that it was being discontinued. Which I'm sure has nothing to do with the quality of the craftsmanship involved.

And yes, if you look again at that last photograph you'll see the hand-held shower nozzle hanging by its hose. Right where it belongs. Because the instructions that came with it told me to screw the holder-thingy through the shower wall and right into a stud, which -- well, first of all: what do you think the chances were of me finding a stud on the first try? Have we met? And second: screw right through my fancy, round, on-sale, pod-bay, transporter, washing-me machine that's been discontinued so I can't get another one even if I have an extra however-many-dollars just lying around? I don't think so.

So I stuck the holder-thingy on with just the double-sided tape that was included. It lasted about a week before it came crashing down. In the middle of the night. I stuck it back, but it fell down again the next night. And the en suite's not so fun when things like that are happening. So the next morning I put the holder-thingy up on the ledge ...

...where it remains to this very day. If I had to guess, I'd say it's been seventeen months now. Once in a while I see it there and get wild ideas involving power drills, industrial adhesives, and the Dirty Jobs Guy, but then I drop the shower nozzle and go on my merry way.

La la...

Oh, yeah, so the point of this whole post was supposed to be the fact that the door's come off its runner. Though "come" off might not be the proper term. Because it was sticking for a while, so I sort of shoved it. That's generally my first defense against broken things -- shove it, drop it, slap it, slam it really hard. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it breaks the thing so irretrievably that it no longer is any of my concern. And sometimes I end up in a sort of limbo.

The shower door rolls now, but it's not right.

I realize you can't actually very well see what I'm talking about in that picture, so I'll describe it -- which I'm better at that than I am taking pictures, anyway:

The bottom of the roll-y bit is in the groove-y place where it belongs, but the toppy part is all hang-y out-y (see? that's why I is a writer). If I bang it, I can knock it in, but it goes all the way in and it's only supposed to go in halfway. And, as we learned in Vegas, if you're in a groove and you go all-in, there's no way that you can roll (which makes absolutely no sense as a gambling analogy, but with all those words to play with I had to try).

So for now my fix-it strategy is to leave it as it is. The door doesn't quite hang right, so it doesn't quite shut all the way, but the mildew hasn't started growing on the wall yet where the mist sprays through.

Maybe I should get in the habit of wiping down that wall-y bit when I step from the shower.

Hey! That's what I can use my facecloths for!