Recycling re-eccentricity

We all have our eccentricities. I have mine, I’ll bet you have yours. Sometimes they’re things we don’t share with the whole world. Or maybe what goes on at home isn’t known in the office, and vice versa.

 

Here in California we are prone to drought, and thus water shortages. Or perhaps it’s less a shortage of water (in the north) than an excess of people (in the south) but I’m not going to get distracted to the political.

 

We have a narrow backyard, maybe 30 feet by 70, with about ten trees. And raised garden beds with flowers and herbs and tomato plants and numerous other leafy friends, some with their species identity still just guessed at. (Are those giant flowers lilies of the Nile?) As such, it takes some water to keep everything and body happy in the summertime, when the rains stop.

 

Which is where gray water comes in. Gray water is a bath after you’ve taken it. Or dishwater, etc. Apparently, for a while here gray water holding tanks were illegal. Mrs. Ombud keeps up with the laws on this more than I do. But as our main floor is on the second story and our main bathroom is toward the back of the house, it seemed like a prudent solution to add a valve to our tub giving us the option to drain bathwater to a holding tank under our back deck, to then be used for watering the lawn.

 

Except that, now that gray water is no longer banned, Johnny Law is stipulating that the tanks be underground.

 

What’s the point of that?

 

I mean, if we could use natural gravity to drain the tub down to the tank, and then gravity again to deliver the water out to the yard, why make us store it underground where it would have to be pumped up to get it out?

 

I’ve got a simpler solution that doesn’t involve paying for storage tanks or plumbers or pumps at all. My solution has the added virtue of giving my sedentary, deskbound self a little exercise, too.

 

I use buckets.

 

Two of them. I fill them from the tub and heft them to the sink counter, for the water on the outside to drain off so I’m not dripping all over the floors — too much. Then I get a little upper body workout. A bucket at a time. It’s a few steps to get out the door and over to the edge of the deck, a story above the lawn, and there I perfect my flinging technique.

 

At first I keep the bucket level and give it a quick sideways thrust, and a nice flat little wave sheers off the top and breaks up into drops, watering the lawn right below. Again, over another patch. The next wave takes about half the rest and goes a bit farther out, and with the last of the bucket I give it a strong fling so it all arcs out into nice little droplets and drenches as far out as I can. I strategize as I heft, working on my flings to maximize coverage.

 

I get as many as five or six big buckets full out of each tub, and late last summer our lawn got  thick and green close to the house. I still have to water the back with the sprinkler, but it sure cuts down on how much water we use.

 

We learned that some of the plants aren’t too fond of gray water. But the lawn is fine with it — and it’s all biodegradable. One of the local proponents claims gray water is better for lawns than tap water — our results at least show the lawn is kept happy.

 

As I have to rise early to walk the hounds and deal with my cars, boats and/or trains commute (grr) I often empty the tub in the predawn dark.

 

I imagine our neighbors can hear the water landing. Boosh. Booooosh! Booooooooosh! Pause and repeat.

 

The other morning, in the dark, again, I was out in my slippers and bathrobe, flinging buckets of water over the rail of our deck. There is a section of our nearby street where a passersby could glance up and see our back deck.

 

I was noticing that I wasn’t hitting one spot of the lawn between our tomato raised bed and the concrete patio I use for brewing, so rather than tipping the bucket away from me I tried to give it a little jiggle outward then tip it toward me, so it would go straight down. I have not yet perfected this technique, and my first clue was the cold bathwater drenching my ankles and slippers. As I stood. Outside in the cold. Just before dawn.

 

It occurred to me that if another early riser were passing by, and if he glanced over at our deck, there is enough ambient light to see that performance. He would see a man in a bathrobe, with bed-rumpled hair dishevelment, swinging a bucket out over a railing away from himself then sloshing cold bathwater on his own ankles and slippers.

 

And if I were that passerby, I would quite probably laugh and think to myself, what a nut.

 

But hey, our plants are happy.

 

Now, what eccentric habits do you have?