Artichokes, Toilets and Showers Oh My!

6/16/2012

This story is true - it happened to me.  If you've been reading along you know that the first disaster Jeff and I had living in my parents' rental house was the floating waterbed.  

This was the second disaster.  We had a party and invited lots of people and one of the foods we cooked was artichokes - lots of artichokes.  I personally didn't like them then and still don't, but the guests ate 'em up.

Somewhere along the time to clean the kitchen, I pushed those artichokes down the garbage disposal.  It wasn't a food that my mother had ever fixed, so I wasn't familiar with proper artichoke disposal.  I am now I promise.

Toward the end of the evening, one of our guests mentioned as delicately as she could that the toilet water was a "bit" green.  Oh and so was the bathtub.  An inspection by Jeff and I confirmed that yes the toilet, the bathtub and the master bedroom shower were all swimming in artichoke juice! 

I dreaded calling Dad because the water bed incident was still pretty fresh in his mind as well as  mine.  And now I had to tell him that I had managed to completely plug up all the plumbing in the house - all by myself - and all in one evening.  It was a difficult call but Dad was a saint - no yelling - no "what were you thinking (or not thinking) and no reprimands.  A plumber had to come out, of course, and ream the remnants of artichokes out of the pipes and soon we were good as new and  the plumbing in the house was usable again.

So what did I learn that day?  Artichokes should be eaten in restaurants if you must have them, stringy food doesn't go down disposals (good to know) and that it was definitely time to buy our own house - which we did.  That, however, is a story for another day.

P