Post 5. Weekend's up!

This weekend was rough - but fun, in a rough way. I wanted to fix the bloody toilet which has been broken since last year and clean up the place and have Erin and Tom over for a small dinner at home celebrating Erin's birthday and cook chinese to take to Mom's for her birthday on Sunday... sounds great, but things took forever!

On Saturday, we woke up late, and brunched on one of our famous "everything" omelettes. Recipe to follow soon.

I started working on the toilet at noon. Basically, it was leaking everytime we used it and we didn't know where it was leaking from. From a previous foray, I'd glimpsed that the shutoff valve didn't close right, so there was always water being pushed out through the pipe that connected to the toilet tank. That was definitely a pain, since I couldn't really shut the water off and it kept leaking - I had to use a makeshift bucket to collect the water in, and empty it out every 2 mins while working on the toilet. Not to mention the position of the bucket was directly in the way of the toilet because of the short hose... ugh.

I bought one of those replacement kits from Lowes (our hardware store of choice) and planned to overhaul all the internals in the tank. The process was easy enough - just strip everything out, and put the new parts in. But life's never that simple... Our previous owners had put a plastic inner-tank to reduce water usage, but the inner layer was leaking into the outer layer - which had no gaskets to stop the water seeping out through the holes. Yes, the previous owners were retards.

Anyway, long story short, after much grunting and labor I managed to get the new kit installed, the holes plugged with new gaskets and the leak stopped. Obviously, my bad'ish back was pinging happily by the end of it. But hey, the leak's gone. I still have the faulty shutoff, but since it's connected back to the tank, it's all good (for now!). So while it works temporarily, I'll need to round back on it again. Ramit's coming this weekend and we're gonna demo the bathroom the week after anyway.

By this point, it was 5pm and I was a smelly, tired skunk. Not a combination that puts either Crina or I in a good mood. Fast forward - Erin and Tom came over, we went grocery shopping (Sam's Club and Jewel in Evanston), cooked while watching an episode of Planet Earth, and ate, drank and made merry chatting up till about 1:30am.

This didn't bode well for Sunday, since we had to cook and take lunch to Mom. Which we did, just not as early as we'd hoped - we reached their place at 3pm. We made Kung Pao chicken, Chicken Fried Rice, Chicken Satays with Peanut Sauce and Wonton Soup. Good shit - Foodnetwork.com has easy recipes!

We also get a huge Tiramisu cake for them (since it's not as sweet and both parents could try it). The surprise was finding Ayaan actually at home! It's always great to see my little brother - although he's not little at all.

We came back home around 7:30pm - but we didn't come back empty handed. Mom had made an awesome 3d painting for us - it's 4' by 2' and it has carved metal on wood... I'll post a picture soon. Looks great!

We spent the rest of the night cleaning up the kitchen (which was a mess!) and putting up the art piece from Mom as two spotlights to highlight it. I think now we have enough paintings around the condo - funny how we went from bare to decked in such a short time!