Drain

I performed a homeowners task on Thursday night that left me both feeling like a champ and wishing I was again a renter. (When I lived in my apartment my landlord had to come three times to unclog the drain.) We've got one bathroom sink (two bathrooms, but only one has a sink--I guess technically the other "bathroom" is a water closet, it's a toilet in the basement in an itty closet. Yes, it's very Continental of us). So, one bathroom sink. Over the past, eh, two weeks our sink has become increasingly slower and slower to drain. Being that I am a blessed-with-an-enviable-but-almost-annoying-volume-of-hair kinda lady, four months is about the exact amount of time it'd take for a standard bathroom sink to become disgustingly clogged with hair.

When I was about 14 I got home from school one day and my mom had left me a note to make rice for dinner in the rice cooker. Simple task, yea? It was. Yet somewhere between putting water in the rice-cooker pot and turning it on I got distracted and the rice ended up down the garbage disposal. Me being 14 and knowing that garbage disposal = another place for food scraps I just turned it on and figured I'd start over. Lesson learned that day: three cups of uncooked rice chopped up into tiny bits DOES NOT move swiftly through pipes. Somewhere around the U-bend the three cups of what now is uncooked couscous stopped moving. S-T-O-P-P-E-D. SHIT! I knew my parents wouldn't have been mad at me if they'd come home to a garbage disposal and sink clogged with uncooked carbs, but I'd feel like a total tool if they found out. Thank Baby Jesus I'm a problem solver. Mom-- I clogged the garbage disposal and kitchen sink with three cups of uncooked rice when I was fourteen and then took the whole sink apart, emptied the mess into that brown bowl we always used to make pancakes and then put it back together.

Sophomore year of college my roommate Desi and I had a a dorm room with our own bathroom (it was awesome) and about three weeks into the semester our shower drain started to clog. We'd only been there for three weeks and I don't have THAT much hair, so we know it must have been backed up with hair from the previous year. We put in a maintenance request to the campus physical plant and about two months later a guy showed up to fix our drain. I am over the FREAKING MOON to announce that the wad of hair I pulled from our bathroom sink was NO WHERE near the gutter rat sized mess that this poor man pulled from our dorm shower. This monster was probably three inches in diameter and all it needed were some eyeballs and it could have been a standard issue vermin. Despite the fact that my own home grown hairball was no where near the trophy liberated from the that Mehling Hall shower back in college it was still relatively substantial, for a one girl hairball.

I'm proud to say our bathroom sink now drains like a charm and I have refined my morning routine in order to salvage my dignity by never again having to pull 10 inches of goopey hair from geriatric bathroom pipes. I also won't even put cooked rice down the garbage disposal--you don't want to tempt fate with a gamble like that.