Adventures in Plumbing

The worst damage the burglary caused, besides taking the laptop and hard drive of much TV, and beyond making me jump up when I lay in bed on the edge of sleep and the neighbours make an undexpected noise, is that when the burglar came in through the bathroom window, he/she cracked the pipe connecting the toilet’s Niagra (I don’t know what the real English term is, this is what Israelis use, and furriners can probably guess what part of a toilet’s flushing aparatus gets that name) to the toilet itself.
Perhaps this should be classified in the Too Much Information! department, but I can get pretty anxious about having a working toilet.
I discovered this damage very late Thursday night; On Friday I couldn’t be bothered finding a plumber (I called one, and he slammed the phone because it was too late in the day). I made do by wrapping the cracked pipe with clingfilm and shreds of a torn up plastic bag. This, remarkably, proved a pretty good temporary measure.
Yesterday I went to Ace, a big hardware store, but they didn’t stock the part. So this morning I went to the Givatayim Industrial Park at Quorazim St., and they had the part, and also a helpful staff, one of whom explained to me exactly how to do the repair. 35 shekels for the pipe, 10 more for a rubber plug I didn’t eventually need. And I was going to call a plumber. Also (thank Suz) I had the hacksaw needed to saw the pipe to fit. So first think on getting home, I took apart the toilet, replaced the pipe and put it together again, in working order. Sometimes, I amaze myself.
The bathroom is filthy, though (nothing to do with the repairs, really, except that I added a rich sprinkling of sawed toilet pipe dust to the rich and varied dust layers already adorning the floor. For a moment, I considered cleaning, but sanity prevailed, and I went to bask in the glory of my triumph, make some pasta and watch some Deadwood.