Blather, rinse, repeat

New rule of thumb: Never allow a new showerhead to raise your expectations excessively.

I like changing the showerhead, mainly because it's the kind of do-it-yourself homeowner project that's visible enough that it seems to carry with it an implication that it took a certain level of skill to carry off. You can drop it into conversations with friends or neighbors: "I was changing the showerhead the other day, and you wouldn't believe how much corrosion I ran on the shower stem." (This statement also wins do-it-yourself bonus points for also featuring "corrosion" and "shower stem", the latter being a term I thought I had just now made up, except that it seems to be the actual name for what I thought it was.)

Of course, changing the showerhead is probably the easiest do-it-yourself project in the bathroom. It narrowly edges out changing the toilet paper, because with the toilet paper, you always run the risk that you'll orient it with the tail facing the wrong direction.

We changed the showerhead because our previous one could blast graffiti off a subway car. This made for an invigorating morning ablution, but also depleted the hot water faster than one might like - faster than the shower at our apartment in Flagstaff, where the hot water heater was, I think, a Thermos bottle. (Also worth noting was the fact that we changed our showerhead in Flagstaff, too, a feat that so impressed our landlady that she regularly brought it up as evidence of my apparent DIY skill - and a statement I never disavowed, regardless of the fact that my wife was the one that changed the showerhead in the first place.)

So the highlight of a recent weekend was a trip to Home Depot, despite the fact that it always takes me 45 minutes to find what I'm looking for there (say, lightbulbs) and I always vow never to return. We spent a fair amount of time chasing our two-and-a-half year old away from whatever sharp objects she could find, and debating whether $79 was too much to spend on a showerhead. "Yes," was our answer.

We settled on one that promised a spa-like experience, as though rain would fall on our shampoo-laden hair.

And it's fine. I've never been to a spa, but it seems unlikely that this showerhead is replicating a $500/day experience. It does feel like a gentle rain shower, provided you live in a part of the world where the ground is porcelain and the rain is hot.

All this is to say that I have a new rule of thumb: Never allow a new showerhead to raise your expectations too much.

But you knew that already.