Yes, that is how serious the whole “don’t wake the baby thing” is.

At night, the potential for baby sleepus interuptus is much lower and the only thing you have to really worry about, save for a tree falling on the house, is the dreaded “middle of the night flush…”

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Perfect example on utilizing wasted space. The pillow was build to fit the available area in the crawl space under the building.

A 3.000 gallon custom size Original Rainwater Pillow installed in the crawl space of LURE will collect rainwater from the 3,450 sq ft roof. Approximately 2,154 gallons of water will be collected from one inch of rainfall providing an annual collection potential of 108,000 gallons.

State building code requires that the collected rainwater be treated to potable standards. This is achieved through a secondary filtration system.

A 22 gallon per minute pressure pump delivers the stored rainwater through the four stage purification system which consists of a 20 micron filter, 5 micron filter, charcoal block, and UV Light treatment.

Municipal water automatic back up is included in the system for times of extended drought.

A typical restaurant uses a tremendous amount of water making the return on investment for this project very attractive. The constant demand for the harvested rainwater on a daily basis for flushing toilets shortens the system’s payback window.

Researchers from Leeds Teaching Hospitals in the U.K. detected C. difficile ” a germ that can cause diarrhea and even life-threatening inflammation of the…

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/flushing-spread-diarrhea-disease-130057221.html

If I’d bought only one item this year with Christmas dollars, it would have been…

Yes – a new toilet!!! And after battling to get a plumber here to install it, firing the first and hiring a second, it was finally installed yesterday. I’m SOOOOOO happy! This toilet actually does what a toilet is supposed to do – flushes and takes what is in it away when it does! I bought a Toto Dartmouth, which flushes with less than 1.5 gallons of water, has a higher rim height, which means it’s easier on my long legs and bad knees, and is styled in the way I want for my future fantasy bathroom remodel. (Think I could use a new floor for starters?) I also opted for the Sanigloss finish and the Toto soft close seat. The seat is actually the only thing I don’t particularly like. The soft close feature is nice, but the seat itself is sort of funnel shaped, sloping down into the bowl from the high outer edge, and I don’t find that to be especially comfortable. I’m also used to being able to sit on the closed lid, and this isn’t as solid as the wood I’m used to having. Toto has a wooden soft close seat, but it cost half again as much as I paid for the toilet, which I found for the best price online at http://www.nationalbuildersupply.com. BTW, my purchase arrived very promptly and extremely well packed, and the service rep I spoke with was friendly and well informed. I’m definitely planning to deal with them again.

Do I feel any remorse in seeing this go?

Not a single tear shed! This Eljer has been hateful from the moment it was installed. It could barely swallow paper on a good day, and non-liquid flushes have required 3.2 gallons of water from the tank, and auxiliary bucket, perfect timing, and a bit of luck. To say I’m currently fascinated to have a toilet that works perfectly every time and with virtually no water is an understatement. Quality of life just went up dramatically here! Am I weird for loving my new toilet???

And in case you are keeping score, yes, I got a Dorothy loom and a Toto toilet this week. Gotta wonder what’s next… and I’m hoping there isn’t a wicked witch involved!

Surprises though can be refreshing. As reassuring as routine is, it’s nice to break the mold every once in a while; kind of like having extra jalapenos in a burrito – a nice little kick in an otherwise ordinary meal.

What constitutes a “jalapeno” in my world can vary from day-to-day.  Finding a tiny little gecko in the house the other night – and proceeding to drown it in my toilet – definitely constitutes a routine kicker. 

Post-mortem I was full of regret – why didn’t I just throw him into the back yard?  Give him a chance to live its simple mosquito-eating existence?  Am I really destined to be a gecko killer? But he got the best of me.  I saw him slithering down the wall and all I could see was myself in bed at night, mouth agape (as it usually is when I’m sleeping), and little G-man quietly slithering into my open mouth.  I couldn’t bear the thought of it.  

 I grabbed him with a piece of toilet paper, my grasp firm, and I dropped him in the toilet.  I flushed. Success!?  No, unfortunately for G-man he was still alive and trying to crawl out of the toilet bowl.  His little tail, by this point dismembered from the rest of his body, was squirming rapidly, desperately trying to find the body it once belonged to.  I shut the toilet bowl and tried to think.  What do I do now?  I can’t just put my hands in the toilet and pull him out of his watery grave. I decided the next best thing to do was pour some bleach in the toilet bowl. Can someone answer me this:  do geckos have nine lives?  Because he just kept going despite the bleach; and despite the Windex that I kept spraying. 

In the end I resorted to pouring massive amounts of water from the shower head to finally say goodbye and send him on a farewell tour of my toilet pipe. Goodbye, little gecko.  It was never meant to be for the two of us because you turned out to be a bad jalapeno.

Good luck, wherever you are.

 A good jalapeno, however, can really make your day.  I decided to take a little break from smoking a certain herbaceous substance and suddenly I found myself sleeping a lot better, feeling more rested and more energetic.  The result of this was an early wake-up yesterday morning.  Not just early – I’m talking butt-crack of dawn early.  I was up before the sun even – 5 a.m. to be exact.  

I walked outside to my balcony and reveled in the morning sky – the early hours of dawn, so soothing and relaxing.  It’s a pleasure to be awake, really.  I sat outside for a couple of hours enjoying the show, completely at ease.  An outstanding jalapeno, indeed…

While the rest of the world is still asleep...

And the earth turns...

Here comes the sun...

And I say, it's alright...

I’m madder than Larry Craig with a broken leg about the latest environmental craziness!

Everybody knows Australians are crazy. They’re the spawn of criminals who got kicked out of England with their hooker girlfriends and had to go live with God’s weirdest animals on a desert island. No wonder they drink so much.

I guess all that beer is causing a big problem: toilet flushing.

The Australian government, which I didn’t even know they had, is now charging folks a tax every time they flush the toilet!

Never mind the Boston Tea Party – if the British tried that on us red, white and blue-blooded Americans, the you-know-what would’ve hit the fan! Ben Franklin and Paul Revere would’ve strung toilet paper all over the city. A man’s latrine is his castle – why do you think they call the toilet the “throne”?

These greenies say water is scarce, but the whole world is covered in it, and it falls from the sky for free. Hell, the Aussies are plum surrounded by the wet stuff. They also say toilet paper’s made of trees, and you know how these hippies feel about trees. But doesn’t that just make toilet paper “natural”? Would they rather we made it out of plastic? I just don’t get it.

I’m pretty sure a country whose water goes down the drain backwards has no business in my crapper, and is probably Communist.

Give our restrooms a rest and stay out of my outhouse, you crazy dirty panda-loving hippies! You’ll have to pry my privy chain out of my cold dead hands!

All my life, i believed that toilets flush in the opposite direction south of the equator.  And in my inner-nerdbrain, i just knew that AT the equator, they must flush STRAIGHT DOWN.  It made perfect sense.  And i had to seek the truth…

As an experimentalist*, not to mention a highly over-scheduled and disorganized woman, i had done no preparation before leaving the country.  Didn’t even have a chance to read up on my destinations, let alone prepare a scientific research plan.  My strategy?  Flush and photograph as many toilets as possible.  Do the “post-game analysis” later.

Before long, my travel mates, as well as the other members of our small tour group, got used to my odd behavior.  My first experimental discovery in a hotel room in Quito, Ecuador (just south of the equator)?  It’s really hard to photograph swirling toilet water.   But in Quito, Ecuador – the toilets all went counterclockwise.  Promising….  The opposite of my home toilet.  An encouraging first data point…

Knowing that the construction of the toilet, and angle of the jets would be a factor, i decided to try the sink for better accuracy.  Let the water reach a kinetic equilibrium and then drain it.  But it would still be hard to photograph.  This led to an experiment with additives**.  STILL counterclockwise. 

When we arrived at the equator in the midst of a torrential rain storm?  i couldn’t wait and dashed right off for the toilets.  Fortunately, my travel mates knew the story, or they’d have assumed i’d had some bad cuy for lunch… The locals apparently have a sense of humor.  This was the sign outside the ladies room.  Remember, folks, this is the region of the world where true shrunken heads exist.  This sign was just a touch creepy…

boobies. creepy boobies.

i excitedly lifted the lid, steadied my camera and hit the power flush.  STRONG counterclockwise swirl.  What?  Not straight down?  Hosed - mislead by pop-science and the media****.  Damn.

Now that i’d acquired a new hobby, however, i wasn’t done photographing toilets.  For giggles, i snapped a shot on the flight to St. Cristobal, Galapagos (about 1degree south of the equator) and even in my cabin on the Galapagos Explorer II.  Nope.  Nothing exciting.  Just some toilet pics at this point.  Although shipboard toilets were marginally “straight down”… but clearly due to construction of the porcelain.

 

So, what’s really going on?  Do toilets swirl in opposite directions above and below the equator?  Lots of good urban folklore says “Yessireebob!”  And, with a spiffy name, the Coriolis Effect***, you just gotta believe it’s true.  So after being back for a few weeks, i finally did some actual research.  OK.  Not research.  i googled it.  Same difference these days…

The way the water in a toilet spins has nothing to do with the Coriolis Effect, and everything to do with how the toilet is constructed.  That’s it.  Pop-scientists disagree on details, though.  Some sources get the direction wrong.  If the Coriolis force were the dominant factor, water would spin counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern.  And my northern-hemispherical commode goes clockwise… Poo…

It’s a myth.  Even if you constructed a toilet a few miles in diameter, it might not happen.  The Coriolis Effect determines weather patterns, not toilet water patterns.  One source suggested a carefully controlled experiment using a large (1m diameter) stationary body of water could demonstrate some Coriolis Effect – lending support to my “sink-based” approach.  A small geek victory in an otherwise disappointing scientific excursion.

The sad truth:  Toilets are simply too small to exhibit the Coriolis Effect.  A rather entertaining explanation can be found via the Discovery Channel ”Skinny” link, which i found via the Toilet Musem FAQ.  Well, crap…

ADDENDUM FOR DOUBTING ALEX L SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR:

Clockwise, Baby! Read it and weep!

* not to be confused with a “mentalist”. 

** coffee grounds in the sink.  geez.  do you really think i’d photograph poo?  that’s just sick… i really wonder about you folks sometimes…

*** Likely to be the name of a future Tom Clancy novel.  Which i won’t read, just like his last several dozen…

**** In what many consider to be one of the best episodes of The Simpson’s (Bart vs Australia), Bart is equally intrigued by this whole “toilet flushing” thing… and it leads to an indictment for fraud from the Australian government, among other things.  In my case, at least the US Embassy didn’t get involved.

- The Bathroom angels sang “Hallelujah!”  Plumbing tolerates paper! 

- Fan-damn-tastic meal last night, Broiled Sole in garlic sauce, vegetables, and dessert – plus 3 generous helpings of a local beer – for $18.  Including service.  And the beer angels sang “Uuuuurp…”

- Working girls, casinos and 110V electricity… just like home.

- Let the experimentation begin:  Very close to the equator (Quito is slightly north of 0 degrees).  While not he primary reason for my journey, i am on a mission.  There will be experimental toilet flushing above, below and hopefully AT the equator.  Relax, people, i’m a scientist… i shall seek truth…