Food in Milwaukee. And other places.
Late harvest. In fact I still have several stalks out in my yard—I used them as landscaping plants and they were fabulous. Nonetheless, considering these are one of my few successful fruit or vegetable ventures this year, it’s a lot easier to get them from the grocery store. This was a freakin’ bitch.
OK, not the first one but the first one that seemed insurmountable. A clogged sink on Thanksgiving Day morning. And when I say clogged I mean call-the-plumber-$500 plugged. I had put Brussels sprouts trimmings down the garbage consposible. Belgium-related naturally.
It’s not that I haven’t had these clogged sink experiences before. But somehow I never seem to learn any lesson. What can I say? As far as I am concerned once it goes down the little hole in the sink it should be going to wherever waste water’s supposed to go. Somewhere I know nothing about. I really can’t be bothered. Oh sure I know there’s a cabinet under the sink but that’s for cleaning product storage.
After some masculine fussing and hand-wringing I peered under the sink at all the white piping that I feel is related in some way to the waste water’s destination and thus, the location of the Brussels sprout blockage. Donning rubber gloves I wrestled the u-shaped pipe off. I had cleverly put a bucket under the pipe after deducing, correctly it turns out, that water might come cascading out. After that I sat and stared into the pipe and finally, left the bucket there and just used the sink as I regularly would with the added step of needing to empty the bucket into the toilet occasionally. This is not as handy as you might imagine when you are preparing Thanksgiving dinner for 12.
Not only is it inconvenient it seemed somehow not as bacteria-free as I prefer the food preparation area to be. Eventually, after I washed the entire place down with bleach water and filled the sink with hot soapy water I was able to continue to prepare the meal a little more comfortably but not necessarily as stress free as I had felt earlier in the day. More on that later.
Later that evening when I was thinking how I was going to afford to have a plumber at my condo for the entire next day when I thought that perhaps the Brussels sprout leaves would shrink up in the pipe as leaves have a tendency to do when they’ve been plucked off the plant. I was correct in that deduction as well. In the morning I ran some water into the sink (after putting the stupid u-pipe thing back on), gave it a good plunge and the clog went to wherever waste water goes. I really don’t want to know.
I’m sure there was a lesson in this somewhere. But it escapes me.
