Pragmatic in the attic
Imagine the excitement when I discover the rough wooden door to the attic, high in the wall in the oldest section of Badger House. Imagine the delight when I discover that it contains a cistern.
Yes, this is the thrilling plumbing post that I promised Brigette earlier. Sweasel.com is all about the minions.
Houses in Britain are generally designed with a cold water storage tank in the attic. This is filled from the mains (what we’d call the ‘city water’) and in turn is fed by gravity into the bathroom taps, toilets and the hot water heater. Only the cold tap in the kitchen sink is fed directly off the mains.
WHY this is so, I haven’t discovered. Not definitively, anyway. So that individual households had a supply of water in case that nice Mister Bonaparte came calling, maybe. To avoid everyone in London getting up at six in the morning, enjoying a fulsome dump, flushing the toilets simultaneously and whooshing the whole United Kingdom down the Thames some morning, perhaps. Anyway, they’ve done it this way for a long time.
Modern water storage tanks are completely enclosed plastic dealies, but the older style cistern is open to the air. I’m going to have to get a ladder and find out what’s what up there. I might be brushing my teeth and washing my face in mousewater. Yum!
It’s probably modern, though. We know Badger House was without indoor plumbing until as late as the 1960s and major renovations were done in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. As per law for historical buildings, the inlet and outlet pipes are all exposed and run across the ceilings and down the walls. From the time we get up in the morning and begin using water, Badger House gurgles and chuckles to itself as water moves around the pipes.
It’s like living in the alimentary canal of a big dozy beast.
December 4, 2008 — 5:35 pm
Comments: 33
A lit-tle too clever for my own good…
When they get wind I’ve left the country, my credit card companies will cut me off. I had to have cards to get here — there were a thousand little, and not so little, moving expenses that wouldn’t take cash — so I didn’t let on. I’ve paid my bills online for years, I figured. I’ll call up from the UK, get my final balance and cancel the account from the warm safety of the Fortress of Solitude, I figured.
Ha! Guess what? 1-800 numbers don’t work from outside the US! Well, they sort of do. They work part way. They string you along. They tease.
You know what it’s like to punch in a boring twelve-digit account number and wend your boring way through all the boring choices in a modern boring automated phone system? Well, imagine you had to poke in twenty digits to get in, and a dial tone cut you off at some random point in the process.
You think this post is boring?
Ummm…you’re right, actually.
December 3, 2008 — 8:07 pm
Comments: 25
Meet my leetle freen’ Johanna
Many activities which appeal to stupid people for stupid reasons appeal to me for good reasons. Really good reasons. Really. It is my curse.
I mean hippies. And recycling (also patchouli, but that doesn’t really figure here). Human beings don’t make enough garbage to spoil the view, let alone wreck the planet (except maybe in China, which is full of diabolically clever and hard-working little people). Upscale Western suburbanites sorting their garbage into colorful plastic bins to be picked up by a fleet of giant belching diesel trucks to Save the Earth is an idea so pointless, loony and mathematically-challenged that even I can work out the formula.
It goes like this: if it is more expensive to recycle a thing than make it from scratch THAT MUST MEAN it requires more energy to do so (in some cases, a lot more energy) and that makes Gaia cry.
Yes. Yes, my hippies. There is recycling that is bad for the planet. Perhaps most of it, as it is practiced today.
And yet…waste is a terrible thing. Maybe because I am sometimes poor…maybe because I was raised by a pack of wild hippies. Whatever. Wasting a thing that can easily be reused offends me right down into my bones. It is an aesthetic judgment, not a scientific one — but I’m an aesthetic sort of a weasel, so bite me.
And zo…meet my new compost bin. Not any compost bin. Oh, no. This is a Green Johanna — a Swedish design that will devour tea bags, coffee grounds, banana peels, meat and fish (including bones!), garden clippings and all that goddamned fruit and veg you buy but don’t eat before it goes off — oh, yes. I’ve seen you do it — and transform them into lovely, glossy black soil. Which, using the magic of whatever the hell it is he does in that greenhouse, Uncle B will transform back into delicious food (if things carry on getting worse, he says, we’re going to grub up the front lawn and plant potatoes).
I love Johanna. I love her better’n that pig we had in the ’70s
And the sweet thing is, the local Council is so chock full of stupid hippies, they’re giving us a Johanna for £19.95, not the £114 list. Hooray for stupid hippies!
December 2, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 24
Exotica of the Day
Prawn crackers.
No, no…not pr0n, crackers. Calm down there, you crackers at the back. Prawn crackers are a staple of East Asia. Ninety percent air, 10 percent rice, and I think their collective grandmother might have seen a prawn at the circus once.
A bag of them is usually included with an order of Chinese takeaway (aka takeout) in the UK. At least, that’s my experience. Uncle B says it isn’t always; depends the size of the order. Well. There are no small Chinese takeaway orders in the Badger household, so that’s my experience.
December 1, 2008 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 32