TooDoo

 We have a white board in our kitchen upon which my wife and I write accomplishments for the month. Things that get moved or fixed or replaced or put right in some way. We track these events by the month. Some are more full than others, and sometimes we have to squeeze things into the margins to capture all the activity. Mostly, it's there as a surrogate for the "To Do List." This is our "To Done List."

June is usually a pretty hectic month, what with me being out of school and looking for something to keep me busy because being busy is one of the ways I know that I am alive. Another way is to have myself paged at an airport, but since I'm not flying anywhere these days, I'll stick to the list. 

After the misfire that was that ill-fated attempt at turning a broken microwave into a Little Free Library. I was still able to put this up on the board under the guise of "recycling," having reduced our science oven to its component materials. But I didn't let that stop me. Instead, I began foraging wood and screws from the pile of debris that exists in our garage. Eventually I was able to cobble together a rough scale facsimile of our house that we painted and put up on a post outside our front fence. The BoogleSnort Free Little Library arose out of the ash that was once a microwave oven. 

Which left me with ten days left in June to fill. And a white board that was getting full, but needed something else to push it over the edge. 

That's when I noticed that our shower drain was all but stopped after my wife's bath. I fussed with it for a bit, checking to see if there was an obvious clog. The plunger technique did not yield any kind of satisfactory results, so I began ruminating. 

A very long time ago, we had our bathroom plumbed in such a way that the sink and the bathtub would drain out the side of the house so that we could reclaim our gray water. It was a very environmentally conscious decision to make. From time to time, the hose that leads out to the front lawn gets a little kinked, and water sits in the sink or the tub while one of us trots outside to make it flow once again. My cursory inspection of the hoses did not reveal a kink, but upon further consideration, I decided to remove the hose from the fitting on the side of the house. When I opened up the valve again, a glug and then a gasp of brownish gray goo as big as my fist emerged before a stream of water that looked like water once again. Not sludge. 

I tried to recall the last time I had checked that hose and could not remember a white board entry in as many months as I could visualize. It had gone a long time, filling up with soap and filth and all the things that would make a drain slow. 

But not anymore. The relief I felt was enormous and just a little embarrassing. Not enough to keep me from writing it down on the white board, but now I've still got a week to come up with something even better.