Cold

I cycled to work today, the first time in weeks. It was -4 when I left the house, and I usually say that -3 is about my comfortable limit when cycling, beyond that it's difficult to keep your face and fingers warm. True enough, 5 minutes into my ride and I thought my face was going to fall off, 10 minutes in and I thought I might lose my fingers to frostbite, despite wearing a pair of windproof gloves with thin woolen ones underneath. The ride home was much more comfortable since the temperature had rose to about +2 or so.

Arrived home to a toilet nightmare: the toilet in the bathroom wouldn't flush. We have a separate toilet downstairs so I was tempted to leave it until the weekend but my curiosity got the better of me so out came the tools. Half an hour or so of fighting with a rusty screw and bolt and I was able to get underneath to uncouple the syphon from the pipe and lift the syphon out. The diaphragm in the syphon had torn therefore not allowing the water to be sucked out into the toilet. A quick look on B&Q's website suggested that a new diaphragm could be purchased but being too late to go and with the cistern in bits I wondered if I could fashion something myself...

I cut a piece of polythene using the old diaphragm as a template. The polythene was a bit thinner so I was a tad unsure whether it would work properly but I thought I might as well give it a go. With syphon re-assembled and cistern semi-re-assembled I let the cistern fill up with water then with great anticipation I pulled up on the rod which lifts the diaphragm.

Woohoo! It worked!

This was very exciting since I'm normally rubbish at DIY. I managed to dismantle something, put it all back together, AND fix it, within a couple of hours and without spending a penny.

I'm considering becoming a plumber ;-)