How I Spent the First Morning of 2008

Rachelle has often said that the first day of the new year is an indication of how the year will go for you. I sincerely hope that is not the case or it's going to be a hell of a year. This entry is going to be somewhat graphic... Fair warning...

We have a really annoying composting toilet that has been nothing but trouble since the day I hooked it up. The biggest problem with it is that the housing is cracked near the bottom of the unit. I've been trying for months now to get the company to come up with a solution considering their supposed life time guarantee on the crapper housing.

I've been working and socializing a lot the last few days and as a result I haven't used our plastic throne for a while. I pee outside. When I went in to the bathroom this morning, this is the sight that greeted me. It may look as though the roof leaked, but in actual fact, the level of fluid in the toilet reached the level of the crack and it leaked all over the floor. Nice, eh.

So imagine that you've got your mother in law staying at your place, you've got some off island friends arriving in a few hours, you're hung over, and you have a belly full of mostly digested margaritas and appetizers that are trying really hard to escape. I pretty much decided on the spot to end this whole charade of trying to make that piece of crap machine work and just start using a 5 gallon plastic bucket until we get a working septic system.

The 5 gallon bucket has a number of advantages over the defective "Envirolet".

• Plastic bucket = $1 or free. Envirolet = $1250
• Plastic bucket doesn't leak. See photo for how Envirolet handles liquid.
• Plastic bucket is easy to empty. Envirolet needs to have the mass shoveled out of the top every 3-4 weeks despite the falsely advertised claim that it can handle 2 people full time.

It was around 10AM that I found myself on my hands and knees shoveling crap out of the toilet and into a plastic bucket. That ordeal was followed by emptying the compost tray of the unit which had almost no compost and contained mostly foul toilet juice. Then I had to scoop out the remaining juice into a bucket using an oyster shell because that's the only thing I had that was small enough to fit inside the unit.

That ordeal left me feeling so filthy and frustrated that I decided to go for a swim in the ocean.