"Righty tighty! Righty tighty!" Mary cried.

I said a word that wouldn't have been very nice, except it came out as a splutter thanks to the icy water spraying my face.

"Righty tighty!"

Mary's aware how I can't tell my left from my right, especially under pressure, particularly water pressure.

I twisted the stopcock beside the commode in the other direction -- whatever that was -- and the spritzing subsided. My soaked hair hung down over my eyeglasses and droplets fell off my beard onto the tiles. Plop. Plop. At least icicles hadn't formed yet. My beard's white enough as it is.

Just one more of my adventures in plumbing.

Mary began mopping the floor. The bottoms of her jeans were soaking up more water than the mop. At least the flood hadn't made into the kitchen very far.

When Mary calls upstairs and says, "Come down quick, I want you to look at something," it isn't usually what one might hope for. This time she showed me the rivulet running down the pipe feeding the toilet tank. It sparkled cheerily. Out in the woods it would have been scenic.

It me took only an instant to diagnose the problem. "It's leaking."

I knelt down for a closer inspection. "Floor's wet," I observed keenly.

"Can you see where it's coming from?" Mary asked.

"Yeah. From under this brass whatchamacallit. Wait, it's plastic. Seems to be loose. Let me give it a turn--"

The crack of breaking plastic was followed instantly by the hiss of spraying water and incoherent choking sounds intended to be curses.

Much righty tighty-ing later, as I wiped my face and eyeglasses and tried to stop my teeth from chattering, Mary -- trusting innocent that she is -- asked if I thought I could fix it.

"With the right tool."

"What's that?"

"A plumber."

So our friendly plumber came to call, for the second time in two weeks. The toilet proved less of a challenge than the furnace had.

Yes, Mary and I exchanged furnace zone valves for Christmas. Now, for the New Year we have fixed up our commode. Since the plumber had to come out to fix the leak, we went wild and had him fit the tank with brand new fiddly bits, to use the technical term. All this on top of the beautiful shiny well pump we treated ourselves to in the spring.

At midnight, December 31st we're going to turn up the thermostat and flush the toilet.

And resolve to be less extravagant in 2012.