Thursday, March 28, 2013

Yesterday Was A Poopy Day

If ya'all... yep, been in Georgia too long.  

If ya'all are a bit squeamish, you might not want to read today's blog.

I'm not squeamish about much of anything.  I'll stick my hands into anything.  I even stuck my hand in a full porta-pottie once, right up to my elbow, because it stopped working.  Not too much triggers my throw-up button.   Maybe that's why I don't get seasick either, for which I am thankful.

I do draw the line at changing a baby's diaper though.  Sure, I did it plenty of times because as a dad you have to, but it always took me about a half an hour because I had to keep on running out of the room to take another deep breath, and then run back to do some more changing while holding my breath, and then back out of the room, and so on.  There's just something about baby poop.

I cleaned dog poop off the foredeck yesterday.  It's where Olivia goes.  I was very proud of her when I discovered this.


Do you know how accurate you have to be to hit a shore power cable just right like that?  Oh sure, it took a lot of practice shots, as you can see all around there.   But then she nailed it, bullseye.

Here's a closeup for you, in case you want to make it your office computer's wallpaper.


I happened to be in the middle stateroom a bit later, and I noticed some water under the head in there.  I never noticed any water before, and finding water where it's not supposed to be is never a good thing on a boat.  We don't use that head as a head.  We use it as a closet.  So I removed everything from on top of the toilet and opened the lid.  It was full and overflowing.


Now, before my landlubber friends get all "Ewwwww!   Gross!" on me, let me explain.  The toilets on many boats, ours included, are below the waterline.   If someone turns the intake valve to "open" or "flush" and leaves it there, seawater will seep in.  It seems someone, who shall remain nameless (Pamela) moved the valve while cleaning in there.  No big deal, really, except I had to unpack the whole head to get at the overboard discharge seacock to open it so I could pump the seawater out.   And, of course, I then cleaned up the mess behind and under the toilet.  I made a note to get a shutoff valve for there.

I thought I should trace that intake line to see if there was a shut-off for it.  Since we don't use it, I should probably shut it off.  I followed the line into the forward head, where it simply tees off that one's intake line.  While I was on my hands and knees checking it, I noticed a kink in that line.   No wonder it pumped a little hard.


When I replaced that toilet a couple of years ago, I didn't notice that I kinked the line.  So I got out my heat gun (if you don't have a heat gun and you own a boat, buy one) and softened the hose up, cut off a few inches, and stuck it back on.

By my reckoning, that's three victory beers.

2 comments:

  1. We used to have a red dog named Seamus. He was a true artiste! On our usual walk route our neighbors had placed two large rocks at the end of their driveway and painted them white. Seamus very carefully would back up to one of those rocks and ....well, you can picture the rest. We were so proud!

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  2. Life must be dull to be writing about dog poop. Really?

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