To flush and be flushed

Winter has set in as Spring has commenced. Rather than watching the Dutch flowers bloom, this Easter has been one, covered in snow. You haven't heard much of me this past week because of the severe pains I had due to my new physical therapy treatment. A new therapist needs to figure out how much each patient can endure. This means that he had to search my limit. Searching a limit sometimes means that you have to cross the line before you know where the limit is and this is exactly what happened just before Kiara's Easter holidays. The pain was so severe that I needed about 2 hours in the morning to get up and running. But despite that, I still managed to go to Zevenaar to my parent's home for Easter, and Monday we had a brunch at home with Marc and his son. I wanted to fix the brunch myself so I banned everyone from the livingroom until everything was done. It is increadible how much it helps when people just let you be while you figure out how you are going to do something. Marc seems to be a master at that and instictively knows when to jump in. He did so after brunch and cleaned up after us.

Last week a new toilet was placed upstairs so I don't have to keep walking up and down the stairs at night. The system is a Sanibroyeur, basically a blender that reduces your faeces to chocolate milkshake, thus making it possible to connect the toilet to a regular drain rather than a normal toilet drain. Two days of the previous week, my house was taken over by the builders who used the drain of the washing machine to attach the broyeur to. I was rather chuffed with my new loo and felt an animalistic urge to mark off my new territory (I needn't say more). I used the toilet quite frequently.

While Marc was cleaning up after the Easter brunch, he walked outside to toss some garbage in the container. As he moved away, a wave of 'water' missed him by a fraction. The wave came from a pipe that protruded from my bathroom wall. It emptied out into the garden. For a day we believed that the previous owner of my house, a crazy DIY freak, had constructed a short cut expulsion for the washing machine. Such Third World scenes would not have been greatly appreciated. I decided to try my luck and call the construction company. This morning they came by and were able to tell me that it was a ventilation pipe that was not able to handle the new floods of water. They closed the system and left behind a happy me. Somehow these situations really seem to drain me. I slept the whole afternoon, as Kiara played with her friends. At the end of the day a new trip to the physical therapist has left me anxious about how the next couple of days will be. I have been ordered to lie down 3 to 4 times a day for 20 minutes. I don't really mind orders like that!

'Shit on the Chinese Wall'

by Who flung poo

MAD MAGAZINE 1970's