Toilet day.

Saturday was one of the most spectacular days of the summer here in the jolly old Hudson Valley, and I spent the day cleaning toilets.

Welcome to suburbia!

To be accurate, there were other household jobs on the agenda, as well as a short piece I'd promised to check out for a client (twenty bucks is twenty bucks). But if I lived in an apartment in the city, jammed in with my wife and one minuscule bathroom, I'd have been done with everything in two hours. Then I'd have been free to... go where?

To the park? But everyone would have been in the park.

To the beach? Everyone else would have been at the beach.

To my cabin in the country? Where I could clean that toilet.

If living in the city is so awesome, why are there such ferocious traffic jams to get out on Friday nights and to get back in on Sunday nights, especially in the summer?

If I lived in a small apartment in the city again, we would not have our big hairy hounds. We might have a small yappy thing that would annoy the neighbors, who would express their displeasure by banging on walls, floor, and ceiling. And if I lived in a small apartment with a minuscule bathroom, I might be divorced by now. When young people ask me the secret to our long marriage, I tell them: separate bathrooms.

Well, I would tell them that if they ever asked.

So many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are out of our control, the things that can ruin a relationship, but if you never have to share a bathroom, you have one major irritant off the table.

This would be clear to most men married to women, I think. Women's beauty and health products have a tendency to expand to fill the amount of space available, a trick that happens to many possessions but not nearly as fast. Further, couples may have strong and yet differing opinions on what constitutes cleanliness or neatness, and that disagreement reaches its apex at the bathroom. Finally, we have the issue of the bathroom's importance in preparing to leave the house, added to the fact that -- as the memes say -- "five minutes" to a woman means the last five minutes in an NFL game where both teams have all their time-outs. Anyone can see how this leads to annoyance and frustration.

Not to mention the Carpeted Bowl issue.

But that's enough about toilets.

Ultimately I took some time Saturday to sit on the porch with the dogs, to bark at any kids coming down the block. The dogs had something to say about them, too. I wasn't kayaking down the rapids or biking up a wall or climbing a mountain in my skivvies or paragliding over a volcano or surfing upside down or anything else that active life-loving people are supposed to do to prove how awesome they are, but you know what? I'm glad I have a porch. I'm glad I have these big, often annoying dogs. And I'm glad I have a bathroom of my own to hide in.