Flowers that bloom, tra la. - Sunday - 2nd August - Lagarde

There’s a reason that advertisements for sanitary products feature flowers and clear mountain streams.  The reality of boating life is that there are never any flowers in a clogged toilet  or a shower waste filter, just body fats and goo and a mat of curly hairs.  The memories of maintaining those devices never fade either, which is why they are rarely spoken of and even more rarely discussed in print.

But there always comes a time when someone cries “Enough!”, which happened a week or two ago when we discovered a pump designed to pump hair and grunge without the need for a filter and presumably therefore without the need to suffer of cleaning it every few days.  Said pump arrived yesterday, and that part of today that wasn’t put aside for varnishing was spent on the five minute job that installing it would entail.   In the absence of paid help, and with the dimensions of the installer, even when folded into four and inverted, being exactly twice and sometimes thrice that of the space which is available surrounding the pump and it’s associated fittings, nothing about the task implied good times ahead.    

The aches should disappear in a day or two, the bleeding has almost stopped on the top of his head, and with just a little luck the shower outlet, now without filter, will never need maintenance again, or at least not unless there is a “chap” around to see to it.