Sanitation

From the "Things I Didn't Want to Learn" file.
:-)

When you throw your dishwater out the back door, you get critters. Buggy critters as well as mammal critters. Mammal critters who dig holes in your yard, looking for whatever food it is they think must be around, since they're smelling the little bits of starch and grease that came off the plates into the dishwater. Besides the holes in the yard, those critters leave piles of poop. Which draws flies. It's really really nice to be able to drain your dishwater down pipes leading to the sewer or septic!

We've been told "When it's yellow, let it mellow. When it's brown, flush it down." Well, we have been using the toilets at church most of the time. But even the "mellowing" overnight can get mega-stinky. And you get bugs in the house when you do that! Yuck! I think I've heard that they used to sprinkle ashes in the outhouses after each use, to keep down the bugs and the odors. Can't sprinkle ashes in an indoor toilet with pipes, though.

I don't know what's up with the kitchen sink. It smells so bad. I'm wondering if it's because of dumping so much of the dishwater outdoors. Or it might be due to the septic-system still awaiting repair. I noticed that the sink was getting pretty grungy, without having hot soapy water in it a lot. Finally I just DID IT -- I hauled out the Ajax and scrubbed the sink, even though lots of water had to go down the drain. That helped, but didn't solve the problem. Smells like my kitchen sink has dead stuff rotting in it. Yuck!

We've also recently noticed the glories of hot water in the shower. The knots in a person's neck and back can be much alleviated by the hot water running over one's back daily. Bursitis can be helped by the hot water. Snotty sinus cavities can be helped by the hot water. Infection can be drawn out by soaking a sore in hot water. I'm beginning to see why doctors in past centuries would prescribe a vacation to a place where there were hot springs. Sometimes hot water (in copious amounts) can do wondrous things for your health that pills can only approximate. It makes you wonder how people plugged away hundreds of years ago, doing much more physical labor than we do today, but without the daily hot baths/showers to reduce the pain. (We're such wusses.)

I'm beginning to see recently how the plumbing we take for granted isn't just about convenience and comfort, but about health too!