A Happy Ending
And with that, hopefully my adventures in plumbing have ended for a long time. I highly recommend Richard Cook Jr Plumbing & Heating in Laurel.
The plumber wound up using a Sawzall and a hacksaw (where the Sawzall didn't work) to get the rusted-on bolts off the toilet. Evidently brass is far better than steel for this sort of thing. I told him I felt much better about having thrown in the towel (proverbially of course - literally, I wrapped it around the base of the toilet) last night and called for help. He said he would have felt bad if he made it look easy.
I also learned the correct way to open and close the main water line: one pair of pliers above the valve to hold the pipe steady, one pair on the valve itself. Having seen that, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know how Captain Legoland did it last night, though I am eternally grateful to him for doing so, however the hell he did it, since I had zero luck.
He'll also come out and give me a free estimate for the installation of a tankless water heater, when we're ready for that, so that's cool.
I tried to game the system this morning though, and lost big time. They had told me they would call on their way over, about 40 minutes' notice, and I could start driving over from my place. I should expect a call sometime between 8am and 10:30am, depending on how the first job of the morning went. I've had trouble with other contractors or delivery people where they call when they are 10 minutes out (or in one memorable case, already there) when they had agreed to call in advance specifically so that I could get there from wherever I was. And i really wanted to make sure the plumber didn't need to wait for me. So I left the house and teleworking at 9am. And the plumber called 40 minutes out, at 10:35am, and finished (see also: Sawzall not doing the trick) at 1:30pm. Oofta. But I got a lot of that silly little internet and phone call stuff done that you never get to in the middle of the day because you're working.
Plan A for today was to start work at 6am and go get my allergy shot when I finished working before 3pm. Here now, so that I can get it before they close, and before I go see my mom this afternoon. I think I am fairly relaxed though, which is new, nice, and a product of working fairly hard at it.
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