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postponed humanure chore
Thursday, April 24 2014
Today I finally got around to dealing the brownhouse humanure situation, a problem I've been kicking down the road for months. I had an accumulation of approximately a year and a half's worth of the stuff in three separate places (in addition to the current active shit bucket). Two of those places were old shit buckets that had frozen solid on several occasions through the long, cold winter. I hadn't thought that there was enough water content in the humanure for there to be a freezing expansion hazard, but I'd been wrong. Both of the old shit buckets (cheap trashcans from the Home Depot) had ruptured. One had only cracked open a little in two places, though the other had split almost all the way down one side. Fortunately, there had been surprisingly little catastrophic release of human excrement into the environment, though most of the accumulated fluid (an amazingly nutritious and surprisingly inoffensive black fluid) had drained away into the soil. While the most-recently-used bucket was full of mostly-uncomposted human excrement, the next-oldest one (removed from the brownhouse in the late summer) had almost entirely composted. That's an unexpectedly-fast rate of composting, and probably wouldn't have happened had the black fluid not drained away (that stuff drowns the ærobic bacteria that make fast composting possible). I also had some very old humanure in the drum composter, and, because it was all fully-composted, I took that up to the gardens, where I added it to an expansion of the lettuce patch between the two tomato patches (built on a layer of those wood ashes I've been weighing with every cleaning of the woodstove). I then transfered most of the humanure that needs more composting to the drum. There was still shit to be moved around when I left things today, but I'd fouled up my shovel and pitchfork too much to continue.
This is all part of my plan to get the gardens in shape for planting, a process that began about a week ago when I'd buried the contents of the two kitchen composter drums in two trenches in the main garden. Today I also added some humanure to the main garden, and some of it wasn't all that well composted, so I buried it deep (mostly to keep the dogs from digging it up).
In other brownhouse news, some creature (a small mammal, perhaps a mouse or a chipmunk) has built a nest in the piss trough that catches most of the urine that I produce when I am making otherwise more substantial use of the facility. I tried tearing the nest out, but the creature immediate rebuilt it. So then I igorned it, pissing into it as I shat in hopes that it would prove unsuitable. But the creature, whatever it was, just kept elaborating on the structure. It seems the creature has won, because now when I go to shit in the brownhouse, I make sure to point my penis lower than its default orientation so that I piss down into the shit bucket instead of into the piss trough. This will make the accumulated humanure moister than it would otherwise be, but I'm a compassionate guy and I've decided to let this little mammal I've never met keep his home. As long as he doesn't decide to bite the end of my dick while I'm pooping, everything is cool.
At some point today, I was so inspired by the ongoing standoff between the United States government and Cliven Bundy, a rancher who has refused to pay the million dollars in grazing fees he owes that I made a Facebook page called African Americans for Cliven Bundy. This was, of course, after learning about an incident where Cliven Bundy had held forth on "the negro" in a decidedly media-unsavvy way, and, in so doing, not exactly dispelling the stereotype that government-hating older white men are, by-and-large racist. My page featured Robert Downey Jr. in blackface (from the movie Tropic Thunder) as its mascot, which applied a lot of delicious subirony and metairony to the issue at hand. Sara Poiron, using one of her troll identities, encouraged lots of our troll friends to like the page, and by the end of the day it had been liked over 100 times. During the page's meteoric rise, I was enjoying myself so much that I drank a bit too much strong liquor and smoked perhaps an excessive amount of pot (all, mind you, atop a thick 120 mg slab of recreational pseudoephedrine), and I stayed up until at least 2:00am reveling in the fun.
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