Holy Crap

Well, my morning got off to a rolicking good start.  I got up and fed the geese, ducks (Quack you very much?  Why, you're quite welcome.  *mutters* 'Bout time...ingrates.) and kitteh, then came in and took care of the bird cages.  I drank a cup of coffee and took my vitamins and bp meds, then picked El Juevo up to take him to school.  It's all good.

I asked him if he wanted a biscuit, since he actually enjoyed one last week.  (He was an odd child...we wondered for a very long time if he had taste buds or a sense of taste because he would eat anything and never expressed any likes or dislikes verbally, although I could sometimes tell he was enjoying something because his eyes would roll back in his head. *snorts, remembering* God, he was so cute when he was little. *shakes self*) Oh.  Anyway, he said he'd eat one, so I headed to the mall to get him a chicken biscuit at Chick-Fil-A and grabbed myself a small pack of chicken nuggets. Everso yummy.  Again.  It's all good.

As I pulled out of the junior college parking lot to head to my Mom's my stomach started getting that ohshitohdear hot feeling. 

Remember my little bleme from yesterday and my "I'm gonna try to eat just lentils and wild rice for two weeks."?  *coughbullshitcough*  That lasted until I realized that fresh chopped garlic and the pre-chopped stuff that come in a jar are not exactly one and the same.  Because personally?  I lurve me some garlic.  And when I make a pot of lentils and rice, I usually, in the name of saving time (yeah, right, lazyassina) I use the stuff that comes in a quart jar, and I use, oh, maybe three quarters of a CUP.  Yes, you read that right.  Anyway, I had no jarred crap, so I chopped up three, count'em, THREE (3!) HEADS (again, yes, you read that right-I didn't say cloves or toes) of garlic and used about three quarters of a cup of that.  I added all my other stuff (onion, broth, wild rice, lentils, and both yellow and brown mustard seed) and let it simmer for a bit, but when I ate a bowl for lunch yesterday, I realized I needed to let it mellow overnight in the fridge.  I figured for dinner last night, a good substitute for the lentils would be steamed baby lima beans, which were good, but would have been mo' betterer if I had let myself put a bunch of little bit of butter on them.  Butter or no, I was rather glad I have no heater in my bedroom last night, as it may have been something of a fire hazard.  The Innocent Bystander can be glad he's in Nigeria.

So, back to me and my roiling hot stomach, driving the maybe three miles between the college and Mom and Daddy's house.  As much as my tummy was churning, so was my brain.  I'm thinking "Can I make it?  Oh, look.  There is the Hansboro Arts Center.  Daddy's truck is there, so he's prolly teaching a class.  I could stop and run in there, but I don't know where the bathroom is, or where he is, plus, this feels like one of those when I don't really want to be in a tiled up, echo-y public jane.  Besides which, whilst I've been having this inner dialogue with myself, I've already passed it.  Dammit!  Oh, shit.  I don't think I'm going to make it."  At this point, I'm coming up on a major dogleg in the road, and I see a spot to pull over.  Again with the churning brain.  "I could pull over right there.  Oh, God, my stomach hurts.  If I pull over, what the hell am I going to do?  Get out and shit on the side of the road?  Jesus. Sure you would, Jackie.  Or, I could just sit here and shit my pants, but I still have to go to Mom's to drop of El Juevo's clothes and stuff, and I know she will see me, and I just can't go into her house with a load in my drawers.  Oh, sweet baby Jesus, what am I going to do?"  At this point, I had the air conditioner blowing full blast in my face (despite the fact that it is in the thirties outside) and my chin on my chest, kinda looking up at the road through my eyebrows, and some little inner spark of sanity told me both how ridiculous I must look and that if I didn't hold my head up it wasn't going to matter if I shit my pants or not.  So, like the proper Boy Scout I was, (Yep.  Ya read THAT right, too.  I was a womynchild ahead of myne time.) I bucked up and put the pedal to the metal and fairly FLEW to Mom's, all the while unbuttoning and unzipping my jeans.  As I screeched into her driveway, I said a little prayer of thanks.

I managed to get the door open and zoomed into the front bathroom, throwing off my outer shirt, 'cuz remember?  HOT stomach.  I sat on the throne and banged on the wall and hollered at Mom to let her know I was there (Lord knows I didn't want to scare the shit out of her!) and took care of business.  

I didn't get in any hurry, because sometimes these things come in waves, and I decided as hot as my gut was, I'd better make sure I was done before I got in my car for the forty minute drive home.  As I'm sitting there, I'm getting hotter and hotter, so I took off my other shirt and sat there with my jeans around my ankles and my bra on, sweating, thinking that maybe it would have been better to EASE into the high fiber thing.  Meanwhile, my stomach is still roiling.  As soon as the next wave passed, I stood up and flushed the toilet, and in one fluid motion, continued down and promptly barfed up my nice, greasy chicken nuggets.  I'm standing there heaving my guts up, bare ass still over teakettle because I still hadn't been able to reach down and pull my pants up, and I hear my Mom right outside the bathroom door asking if I was okay. All I could think of was "Please, God, don't let her open that door."

I'm pleased to say that other than some stomach cramps from heaving, I don't seem to be any worse for the wear.  I don't feel sick and the 'hot' seems to be gone.  I ate a few spoonfuls of lentils and rice a bit ago and it has mellowed quite nicely, and it seems to be sitting well, although I will probably eat some steamed veggies or something later so I don't blow myself out of the water tonight.  Anyway, that's how I started MY week.  I hope yours is starting much less dramatically.

Paradise at a price

If you've not yet had your coffee, you may want to drink it before continuing this post.  This is one of those posts that may squick you out.  Then again, if I didn't lose you at the Wall O' Boogers, I prolly won't lose you now.  Just in case though, consider yourselves warned.

This post is actually one I've been toying with for a while, but some comments yesterday from the newest redhead in my collection, Braja, coupled with the timing of this article I ran across yesterday evening convinced me that it is time.

Today's subject is water.  Specifically, my 'choices' of water here in my little corner of Paradise.

When we bought the houseboat, we still had property and a home in Vancleave.  What we weren't really aware of until we tried to sell the property is that it was on wetlands.  This will be significant as my story unwinds.

We did not intend for this houseboat to be our home.  When we bought it, we were really just trying to find a place where we could go on weekends with our deckboat without having to go through the hassle of launching it and taking it out and launching it and taking it out, which is a huge pain in the arse what with having to completely wash it down each time it is taken OUT.  *thinks about the Grandpa shaking his head at that sentence*  

We knew when we bought the houseboat that our only source of water was the river.  At the time, I did not think about the implications of this since we were really just camping when we were here.  It didn't take long, though, for us to fall in love with this river and the life we were finding on and in it.  We are not teenagers walking around with rose colored glasses, however, so that love was tempered with just a little shiver of revulsion.  For soon after we started staying on the houseboat overnight, we realized that not only was river water being pumped into the houseboat, it was also being flushed right back out into the river.  AND ALL THAT IMPLIES.

We would have put a sewage treatment plant on our houseboat if everyone else would, too.  But they are very expensive, and most of our neighbors can't afford to.  We even tried to push the issue (which in retrospect was not that bright-some folks out here are quick to shoot and ask questions later).  The Innocent Bystander called the EPA, the Bureau of Marine Resources and the Coast Guard, but no one would admit that this was something that their department could deal with.  I have done some online research and know that this issue has come up in reports that are made on the river's 'health', but I think everyone wants to try to ignore it until it goes away.  *shakes head*

Now, normally I'm not that squeamish.  I mean, really, when I think about some of the things I've put in my mouth, I have no call to go all Miss Priss on anyone's ass.  But when you get out of the shower and have to make sure no one's going to say "Hon, c'mere.  I think you have a little bit of turd right here in your hair," you have to really close your mind to some things if you don't want to have nightmares.  I really loved being out here, and hated driving forty minutes every day to Vancleave to shower, so I convinced myself, as I'm sure everyone else who lives out here does, that animals poop all over the place and it runs into the river every time it rains and it doesn't bother anyone.  We swim upriver all the time in fish poop water.  When we camp, we wash our pots and pans in the river and reuse them the next day.  If I can tolerate all that, I guess I can tolerate this.  So we used a lot of paper plates and plastic cutlery, and pretty much moved onboard.

But there was still El Juevo to think about in Vancleave, and two acres of grass up there that had to be cut on a regular basis.  The Innocent Bystander was back in Venezuela by this time, and it was getting to be a real pain in the buttocks running back and forth, so when I saw the little house up the road go up for sale, I called the realtor and set up an appointment to see it the next day.  I put in an offer as soon as I saw it, and the owner accepted our bid, so I put our property in Vancleave up for sale and it was sold within ten days.  It was actually sold the first day I listed it, but the guy who wanted it stipulated it couldn't be on wetlands.  That was when we found out about that, and also that the water would not pass the health department test.  The second offer we got on it was aware of that and did not care.  SO.

SO.  We get our health department test on the little house's water back and find that IT has some kind of coliform bacteria in it. We also find after a week or two that it has a peculiar rust bacteria in it that stains our tub, sinks and toilet a beautiful shade of burnt sienna.  It is a brand new well, drilled post-Katrina, and the health department told us to run the water for a week and that that should clear it up.  Since we had no choice in the matter (the place in Vancleave was already sold and the houseboat is too small for all of us) we decided that ignorance is bliss and have since then just taken it on faith that the water is okay for bathing in.  We've used bottled water for all of our cooking and drinking at both places since the storm.  What is so bad about that since evidently we've been using water just as bad in Vancleave for the last ten years?

Fast forward three years.  I've been bathing at the house for the most part, although our washer on the houseboat used river water.  Our neighbor gets this new boyfriend from 'north Georgia' and he is just completely freaked about the water situation.  He is bathing in bottled water.  Guess he's not had as much stuff in his mouth as I have.  Anyway, he and the Innocent Bystander have this bromance going, and he talks the IB into putting in a well for us to share with the promise that he would build the pumphouse etc (didn't happen, but that's another story).  We get the first well drilled.  They go down 150 feet and hit SALTWATER.  WTF???  So they have to redrill, and as the IB didn't want to spend any more money on this than he had to, he only had them go down 50 feet this time.  They got 'fresh' water this time, so they stuck the pump on and here we are.  I start running our new, fresh water that is now going to my washer, my sink, my shower and my terlet and discover that we have a problem.  Evidently we have a very high hydrogen sulfide content in this 'fresh' water, because it smells like FARTS.

There you have it.  My choices are poopoopeepee river water (and let it be noted I do not eat ANYTHING that comes out of this river!), coliform/rust bacteria water or fart water.  Is it any wonder I will travel anywhere, anytime?  Or that I fantasize about a nice long HOTEL bath? (I bring my own cleaning products and Calgon!)  Third world countries have nothing on us!