We’ve been living with an inconvenient situation for over a month now regarding the you-know-what in our main upstairs bathroom.  (Kathy’s dad left a message this afternoon asking about our “newly installed apparatus” and I had to smile at his discretion.)  The thing would flush, but for some reason the handle was becoming increasingly stiff, to the point where you had to push down as though you were trying to shove the whole stool down through the floor – which I’m pretty sure would have been a bad thing to do.  But honestly, it became a toilet that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could love and as we were forced to use more and more muscle to move the handle, we had visions of a terrible moment when something would break and we would have the Fountains of Rome in our little bathroom.  So we ended up using our guest bathroom instead and hoped for a plumbing-inclined friend or relative to swing through and take a look at our sad situation.  Eventually it became clear that the Plumbing Fairy was not going to be paying us a visit and we called a real live plumber, who we had look both at the bathroom and at our kitchen sink, which was leaking water underneath.   (When I protested, Kathy said that the position of the pipes makes it impossible to put a good-sized bucket under there to catch the leaking water. Why not, I countered,  find some sort of flatter pan to lay under there instead of a bucket.  There’s the single biggest difference between the two of us-  Kathy Berg prefers to repair the leak while Greg Berg prefers to devise better ways to catch the leaking water.  What’s wrong with this picture?)  Anyway,  by the time the friendly guy from Stein’s Plumbing had left our house,  we had written him a check for a lot of money . . .  I shouldn’t be too specific but let’s just say the final figure was more than three digits and less than five digits.  (That’s a lot of opera videos!)    But I guess that’s preferable to ending up with your toilet in your dining room amidst a pile of plaster.   So we have a brand spanking new toilet in our bathroom and for the price we paid, we sort of feel like having the Queen of England over to try it out.  (But I’m not sure her calendar and ours will match up.  We may have to settle for the wife of the Prime Minister of Luxembourg.)   And we now have a new kitchen sink faucet that Martha Stewart might not covet but would at least be willing to use under duress.   And leave it to Kathy to put things in perspective…. She pointed out quite rightly that we have lived here for eight years and have never had to have a plumber on the premises,  so we should count ourselves fortunate.  And honestly, when I think of the good people of Quincy, Illinois and other communities along the Mississippi River who are up to their eyeballs in sandbags, desperate to save their homes and businesses, a hefty plumbing bill no longer seems like the end of the world.