Fatale Abstraction

OK, by popular demand, here are some of my crappy little beads. Yeah, I know they're wonky, but they are just right for my wonky jewelry.

Here's a story from this weekend AND about 28 years ago.
In the late 70s, my grandpa and grandma had built a new house about 100 yards from their old one, this time with an indoor outhouse. Creeping out to the outhouse to pee in the middle of the night, I was gripped by an abiding fear that a copperhead snake would bite me on the butt, and consequently I lay awake there many a night, near to bursting rather than risk it.

So the Grands' new house with indoor bathrooms was a glorious thing, but I really wasn't accustomed to the low water pressure situation that came with being off the grid. One event in particular scarred me for life, I'm sure.

In my early teens at their house once, I went to the bathroom only to discover I was afflicted with a case of direer. Horrors!

As would anyone in my delicate state with such fragile sensibilities, I thriftily used about half a roll of tissue on tidy-up duty. I flushed several times, and it all seemed to be gone, anchors aweigh!

To my utter horror, the next person in the bathroom was Grandpa, for whom the new toilet happily regurgitated a goodly portion of what I'd insisted it swallow.

Grandpa then fished the entire mess out of the toilet and carried it into the living room in a bucket showing all and sundry while saying "I just want you to look at what someone put in the toilet!" I took my cues and feigned casual surprise (well, I WAS surprised but not about what had been in the toilet) and hoped no one had kept careful track of who had made the most recent trek to the WC. I was mortified.

Flash forward to last weekend: Haunted by the specter of that day all those years ago, I went into the bathroom and noticed a bit of toilet paper from the last visitor had not gone all the way down the hatch, and even though I could hear the water was still running to fill up the tank, I hit the plunger, knowing no one had been in the bathroom for quite a while - the tank must almost be full.

Not so. I flushed and the water but not the toilet paper in the bowl went down, to be replenished by no more water. PANIC!

Oh shit. What's Grandpa gonna do this time?

So of course, it became my mission in life to fix this situation.

I pulled the lid off the tank and peered in, and water was running into the tank, but at a snail's pee trickle pace, and it was going to take forever at this rate. I looked around for any kind of vessel with which to bail water from the sink into the tank. The only thing I found was grandma's delicate little china cup on the counter with a capacity of maybe 3 ounces. Right. I needed to fill a 5 gallon tank. Might as well start bailing.

I'm short and the sink was a pretty long stretch for me between it and the toilet, so I braced on my left arm and started filling the cup and pouring it into the tank with the right.

I achieved something of a trance-like state. After I'd added about a gallon 3 ounces at a time, a tremor quaked up my stressed left arm and I jolted out of my daze and realized this was ludicrous. I broke down into gales of laughter at how incredibly silly I was, and I felt weak from the exertion and the laughter.

I sneaked into the kitchen and got a couple of large drinking glasses and began to fill the tank. That done, I flushed it and goody - everything went away.

THEN I used the toilet, refilled the tank, and flushed and refilled it again. Mischief managed!