My fairly new toilet upstairs is pulsing water and running constantly. I took the top off the tank and was once again reminded of a Rube Goldberg machine. Do you remember them?

I used to love looking at them in the Sunday funnies and trace through the actions, to the final (ridiculous) outcome. All my girl cousins thought that was a weird way to spend part of my Sunday comics time but the boy cousins and I had a great time wrangling over the feasibility of the diagrams.

A great time with the toilet? No, not even with its Rube Goldberg-ness. I wiped off the flapper, but that wasn't the problem. As I re-flushed and listened, clearly the problem is in the tank valve. There's probably a way to open it, clean and adjust it, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.

And it's a fancy, close to the wall style, so the working room is minimal--just enough to get your hand inside the tank. What I need is a child...

On second thought, no thanks.

So in frustration I turned off the intake valve at the wall. I suppose I'm going to have to spend megabucks to have a plumber help me do something really easy (if I knew how) but until then I can just keep turning the valve on and off.

Maybe it's the fault of the upcoming equinox. Machines know that it is a time of mystery and madness, so they're going to revolt while they are still conscious, before they slip back into mechanical slumber.

I've been reading way too much recently.