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the urinal is working again
Sunday, March 26 2023
This morning as Gretchen and I had queen beed in Spelling Bee in record time, we heard an unexpected knock on the door. The dogs ran out through the pet door and I could hear squeals of delight on the other side, suggesting that whoever was out there was not afraid of them. I opened the door to find a pair of teenage girls, one black and one white. They were both dressed nicely enough that I immediately determined that they were there for an evangelical Christian purpose. One of them somewhat-bashfully handed me a flyer advertising a memorial for the death of Jesus Chris, to take place at a Best Western. They didn't say so, but they were, as you might've guessed, Jehova's Witnesses. They asked what the names of the dogs were, and they made an effort to remember my answer. They also asked about the raised beds in the garden and what kind of flower was coming up near the front door. At that point Ramona put her head up the skirt of one the girls, followed immediately by the other. "Ramona!" I mock-chided her as they excused her behavior because Ramona is female.
The day soon became a lovely and almost warm one, and I took advantage of the conditions to do something I'd been procrastinating for over a year: flushing out the laboratory urinal system. All this time it's been clogged and I've been pissing in a can and dumping it out when it fills. If this sounds gross, it was. The main problem with doing things that way is the ever-present smell of urine. To unclog the narrow pipes of the laboratory urinal, all I needed to do was dump in a few tablespoons of Liquid Plumr, let it do its thing, and then use my urinal pressurizer (along with an air compressor I use for almost nothing else) to force this Liquid Plumr down into the system. I had trouble finding the urinal pressurizer because I'd stashed it away behind some bottles on a shelf near the entrance to the laboratory. But once I'd found it, getting the urinal working again was not much of a chore. The most difficult part of it was to carry away the old urine-soaked pine needles in the collection bucket so I can bury them in the garden, something I hadn't done since we got the new raised beds.
Not unexpectedly, I was feeling hungover from last night's gin and tonics. But it was a surprisingly mild hangover given how fucked up I'd made myself last night. At some point I went down to the greenhouse to take advantage of the warmth down there (and also, in part, to get away from the cats, all of whom have become unbearably needy).
This evening I treated my hangover with the best cure there is, a nice hot bath. After that, I completed some procrastinated workplace work. While I was doing that, my brother Don called from Virginia to tell me that someone came to take away our mother's (Hoagie's) one remaining horse, meaning my childhood home is horse-free for the first time since the 1970s. Apparently Hoagie's power of attorney Joy Tarder took this action without telling Don anything about where the horse was going.
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