i noticed it last night while i was getting ready for bed: my toilet bowl was dripping water. normally after a flush it might drip a few drops, but i hadn't use it in a while and it was still dripping water. i opened the tank and saw the problem: the water level was right at the overflow tube. i adjusted the height of the fill valve float then flushed the toilet. 2 things happened: water began spraying onto the back of the tank, getting onto the wall, and when the fill valve finally stopped, the water level was still right at the height of the overflow tube. this meant the toilet was leaking. for how long i couldn't say, but the fact that i have a wet spot on my bathroom wall behind the toilet since this summer means the fill valve must've been damaged since then.

when i woke up this morning i flushed the toilet again to see what would happen. it filled the tank to the top of the overflow tube. this meant i needed to get a new toilet fill valve. luckily i replaced a few, so it wasn't a big deal. however, i just recently replaced the fill valve (august 2018), and it hasn't even been 3 years yet and it's already broken. the one that i got last time was the danco hydroclean 660; i like that one because it comes with an extensible tube that squirts jets of water along the edge of the tank to clean the bottom. i checked on homedepot.com, it seems they no longer carry it in the store, and i'd need to special order it. i could wait that long, so i figured i'd get whatever was the cheapest at the store.

i biked down to the cafe to borrow the car and drove to the watertown home depot. temperature was in the 30-40's, which felt downright spring-like after the negative wind chill weather we've had the past 2 days. my father also asked me to get a pair of light switches. home depot's doing some renovations so they moved all the light switches to the back of the store. there's also supply issues and they were mostly out of the white-colored switches, but i found some after a lengthy search. as for the toilet fill valve, i grabbed the fluidmaster one (performax high performance $13.98). i've used the fluidmaster fill valves before (400A), back in october 2020 when my father and i fixed the cafe toilet.

i stopped by my parents' house on my way back to drop off the light switches and to caulk a hairline crack in the window frame of my old bedroom that'd been seeping in cold air. i also went into the backyard to check on the daikon radishes, they're still alive under the plastic row cover. i smelled some gasoline and noticed some spill near the heating oil spigot. my mother said the heating oil company hadn't arrived yet, but when i checked the webcam, they were here at 6:40am this morning, just didn't leave a receipt in the mailbox like they normally do.

i returned the car to the cafe and biked the rest of the way home. when i got back i started repairing the toilet. after closing the water supply and flushing the tank, i sopped up the remaining water in the tank with a sponge to get totally dry before releasing the supply line from the tank. i then unscrewed the old fill valve. there was a visible line in the plastic where the crack had formed. how it happened i'm not sure, seems like a material failure issue. then it was just a simple matter of installing the new fill valve. i had to trim the refill tube because it was too long, but otherwise everything worked flawlessly. toilet bowl filled to the correct, and the water line in the tank was about an inch below the overflow tube.

only then - approaching 2pm - did i make lunch. i had another english muffin sandwich, this time i grilled the slices of virginia ham because they were starting to go bad and i wanted to "cook the germs." i made a matcha latte, using the technique where i first dissolved a tsp of matcha powder with some hot water using the frother. i also added a tsp of honey. i heated up a glass of milk in the microwave (1-1/2 minutes) then poured the matcha mixture into the warm milk. i then used the frother to mix everything up. the resulting matcha latte was perfection: frothy, with the matcha powder completely dissolved, and a much stronger matcha taste compared to the way i did it before.

after lunch i went on some errands. i walked to star market to stock up on some frozen meal bowls. there was a contractor ahead of me in line who wasn't wearing a mask. nobody said anything but some of the customers were glaring at him. he was buying a package of bottled water and a red bull. when i saw him outside, he got into his pickup truck with NH license plates. i don't want to stereotype, but he looked like the kind of person who purposely wouldn't wear a mask, and i'd bet he's not vaccinated either.

i biked to whole foods to return a gopro silicone sleeve. it was a weird purchase where the item dropped in price, so i bought it again to return the original, to get the discount. turns out i didn't have to do that, amazon has a thing where if you're returning something because you saw it for a lower price on their website, they'll do a price adjustment.

i then went to market basket. there was a young man at the checkout line without a mask, and the store manager was actually giving him a lecture about the mask mandate. the young man seemed generously remorseful, but it's hard to imagine he didn't know about the mask mandate living in the area. i went to MB primarily to get some bagels, but i ended up getting some ingredients for making nachos this weekend, my mother's been asking about it for weeks.

i made kale chips with the kale i bought last week. kale's pretty tough and it seemed like they were in good shape, but when i started to peel the leaves off, there was a large patch of mold in the center of the kale bundle. in all my times working with kale i'd never seen that before. i did two batches again, so i wouldn't crowd the baking pans. once again, i added way too much salt, and way too much olive oil. next time: just a tsp of olive oil, and just a tsp of salt.

bruce texted me in the evening, said jack made some white beans kale tomato soup, and asked if i'd be interested in trying some. i went over to their place where bruce handed me a container of soup. i brought it back home and had it for dinner. it was pretty hearty, i wasn't hungry afterwards, filled me up. with some additional ingredients - okra, rice, sausages - i would've made a very good gumbo stew.