Yoga as a practical skill

Say you wake up one morning to find that your toilet seat has a crack in it. No idea how it got there, but these things happen. The crack, however, pinches the back of your thigh. You go off to Lowe's and buy a mid-range white wood toilet seat. You pass up the twice-as-expensive ANTIMICROBIAL toilet seat in fancy space-age plastic, despite your inner germophobe's best efforts at getting you to spend the extra fifteen bucks.

You figure, well, if they sell them at Lowe's, and the box says "easy installation," all you need is a Phillips screwdriver, it can't be all that hard. Right? In theory, yes. You unscrew the bolts holding the old seat down, lift, drop a new seat on, attach bolts & nuts, tighten, bada-boom.

But wait. The old toilet seat does not appear to have bolt tops visible. No, no indeed. You must unscrew the nuts from *beneath* the toilet bowl rim in order to get the bolts off. Your bathroom is very, very small. You cannot find your socket set (socket wrench? check. Sockets? Who the hell knows?). You try to unscrew the nuts by feel instead of sight. It takes a while to figure out that the righty-tighty-lefty-loosey rule is in fact REVERSED when unscrewing the nut. It's impossible to grip a nut with pliers if you can't actually see it. It's wedged up under the rim, at an angle. Onto the floor with you.

For the bolt to the left, you must lie on your side, bend to the left (like an L) and tilt your head up about 45 degrees while unscrewing the bolt that has been stuck there for at least 6 1/2 years. Fortunately it's not stuck or rusty, but it's awkward as hell. Okay. Broke a sweat there. Now for the other side. No way can you lie down due to tiny, tiny bathroom space. Lo and behold, yoga comes in handy! You stand up, perform a deep waist bend, hang your head to your right, lower than the rim of the toilet seat, turn your head to the left, use your right hand to unscrew the bolt, and after a great deal of non-yogic cursing, that nut comes off.

NOW it's easy-peasy. Lift seat, put down other one, plastic nut, plastic bolt, yadda yadda, nice new non-cracked toilet seat. I hope the fifteen dollar seat lasts a while, because I really, really, do not want to do this again.

I also hope the damned thing wasn't made in China. I forgot to look before I bought it. Hell.