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more of a creationist
Thursday, April 6 2017
Over the winter, my laboratory's flushless urinal system developed blockages and its drainage slowed to a crawl. Though, of course, it being winter, it wasn't immediately obvious whether the problem was a temporary one caused by freezing or one I had to take action to fix. By April I had my answer. The probem was one I had to fix. Evidently crystals had built up yet again in the narrow plumbing of the system and I would have to flush Liquid Plumr (sodium hydroxide) through it. So I use a glorified turkey baster to decant all the pooled up urine from the urinal and put in a little Liquid Plumr. I then used my urinal pressurizer to force the Liquid Plumr on through. This seemed to work okay, but when I went out to check the bucket on the outside of the house to make sure it was all coming out there, I found almost no liquid had made it out that way. Mind you, I put more than a gallon (of mostly water) into the system from the top. Where had it all gone? Not surprisingly, I found it had ended up in the overflow bucket in the shop area of the garage. There's a bucket to catch the overflow should the pipe leaving the house freeze, though it only has a five gallon capacity. After that, it overflows onto the floor. I found that it had indeed overflowed, filling the garage with a fragrance that reminded me of rancid shrimp. Fortunately, the floor is tilted slightly towards the wall where the overflow had happened, and most of the urine had drained into a crack between the foundation wall and slab. (This includes most of whatever had gone through the system in the past few months, which hadn't actually been that much; the system had been working so poorly I'd mostly been pissing in a half-gallon gin bottle.) Since the urine in that overflow bucket was now mixed with sodium hydroxide, I couldn't just dump it in some place like the garden. I chose instead to let it be slowly diluted by runoff from the house's roof in the ongoing rain (which was coming down relentlessly). I also tossed numerous silver bowls' worth of water onto the concrete where the months-long urine spill had played out. The solution to pollution being dilution. There's a carpet fragment that soaked up some of that urine and will have to be put out in the rain at some point, but I saved that task for another day. Meanwhile, the fetid seafood smell isn't so bad, especially if you don't know what it is.
I added some threading to the overflow spout and then attached a cap onto its end to block the flow of urine from that direction and again applied water and pressure from the laboratory. Yet again the water went in but didn't materialize at the bucket outside the house. This time I found that the fluid was pouring out of the top of the second urinal in the shop (one I almost never use). It turned out that the blockage for the whole system was in the clear plastic hose directing the outspout to the collection bucket outside the house. Once that hose was removed, fluids flowed correctly through the system. As disasters go, there are ones you might prefer to gallons of urine spilled in your garage. But truth be known, it just doesn't skeeve me out all that much, particularly since the urine is all my own.
[REDACTED]
Gretchen had an animal rights event to attend in the City tonight and she was going to be spending the night. So, as I often do, this afternoon I went out to buy provisions. [REDACTED] This took me out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where the only worthwhile things were a USB-mini cable and an esoteric clamp (the total cost: $0.50). I also went out to Hannaford mostly to get Ben & Jerrys' vegan icecream, Annie's frozen vegan burritos, beans (of course!) and beer (also of course!). I also went to Herzog's to get yet another quart of Lemon Twist yellow for the laboratory floor. The yellow shapes are the hardest to get to the hoped-for monolithic hue I'm striving for in all the shapes. This is, I think, because this is the first time they'd been repainted since 2003.
Oscar in the laboratory this evening.
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