I've lived alone my whole adult life, unless you count the philodendron I got when I had my wisdom teeth out. It doesn't do tricks and almost never helps with the dishes.

As an only child, I wasn't expected to do much except walk on water. My mom cooked and cleaned and did laundry -- and worked, too -- and my dad worked and drank and killed spiders and tried to fix things by swearing at them and perspiring vigorously.

When I grew up, I had to learn to do all these things for myself.

The day I moved into my first apartment, my dad bought me a plastic toolbox and filled it with a hodgepodge of pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers and an adorable hammer meant for a child or elf.

(Where do all the nails and screws come from? I know the Allen wrenches hatch from IKEA furniture. But are the nails and screws breeding? I think I just answered my own question.)

Over the years I added more screwdrivers, 687 picture hangers and a massive pipe wrench. I bought that the summer the East End rapist was attacking women who lived alone on the first floor in the East End and I was living alone on the first floor in the East End. I knew if I bought a gun I'd end up using it on the step dancer upstairs.

(Statistics show most legally purchased handguns are ultimately fired not on intruders but on step dancers.)

The pipe wrench was intended to be a weapon. I kept it tucked within reach under my bed and was going to use it to bash in the skull of any evildoer who jumped on me in the night. The last thing in the world I thought of using it for was plumbing.

Because plumbing is terrifying. There are suburban dads who would rather clean the gutters with explosives, wallpaper a football stadium or ground a lightning rod to their own fillings than attempt plumbing repair.

Too bad I like a challenge. I'm drawn to pointless, quixotic projects like a moth to a blowtorch.

So when my toilet got harder and harder to flush until the handle finally broke, I did what any busy professional woman with no knowledge of plumbing would do: I took the lid off the tank and started poking at things.

How hard could it be?

The guts of a toilet are probably one of the simplest mechanical systems in the world. There's no electronics, no Bluetooth technology, and toilets don't run Vista.

They just run, when their valves go.

But my toilet wasn't having a valve issue; it needed a new trip lever. A lever! A stick with a handle on the end! Technologically, only slightly more complex than a crowbar.

I should have just bought a crowbar and hit myself in the knees with it.

You'd think that if you go to the hardware store and buy a part that looks like the one you're replacing and is made by the same manufacturer, you'd be in the clear. Ha! Ha ha ha! You're living in a fool's powder room.

For starters, the lever was longer than the old one -- too long to hook up to the flush valve, in fact. So I sawed the end off the lever.

I don't actually have a saw. I was using some kind of Swiss-Army-style thing from the Sharper Image that had a half-dozen saw teeth, a chisel, a bicycle tool and, I think, a duck call.

It took a while. There was a lot of shrapnel, and the lever was still too stiff to connect to the flush valve. The package said you could bend the lever, and it would retain its shape. It also said fixing a toilet was "easy as 1-2-3!" This package would say anything.

There is only so much of a weekend I'm willing to spend up to my elbows in a toilet tank. (It's more than you think.)

But I did not get a master's degree to be bested by a commode. At least I'm pretty sure that wasn't the reason. I found a shorter trip lever and installed it successfully. I need to work on the vigor of the sweating, but I totally nailed the swearing thing. I know what my dad would say.

"You have a landlord for that. Duh."