Mattie's Random Ramblings

99 Things

2009-01-14T14:22:00.006-06:00

Another meme

Things you've already done: bold
Things you want to do: italics
Things you haven't done and don't want to - leave in plain font

1. started your own blog
2. slept under the stars
3. played in a band
4. visited Hawaii
5. watched a meteor shower
6. given more than you can afford to charity
7. been to Disneyland/world
8. climbed a mountain
9. held a praying mantis
10. sang a solo
11. bungee jumped
12. visited Paris
13. watched a lightning storm at sea
14. taught yourself an art from scratch
15. adopted a child
16. had food poisoning
17. walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. grown your own vegetables
19. seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. slept on an overnight train
21. had a pillow fight
22. hitch hiked
23. taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. built a snow fort
25. held a lamb
26. gone skinny dipping
27. run a marathon
28. ridden a gondola in Venice
29. seen a total eclipse
30. watched a sunrise or sunset
31. hit a home run
32. been on a cruise
33. seen Niagara Falls in person
34. visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. seen an Amish community
36. taught yourself a new language
37. had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. gone rock climbing
40. seen Michelangelo's David in person
41. sung karaoke
42. seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant
44. visited Africa
45. walked on a beach by moonlight
46. been transported in an ambulance
47. had your portrait painted
48. gone deep sea fishing
49. seen the Sistene Chapel in person
50. been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. kissed in the rain
53. played in the mud
54. gone to a drive-in theatre
55. been in a movie
56. visited the Great Wall of China
57. started a business
58. taken a martial arts class
59. visited Russia
60. served at a soup kitchen
61. sold Girl Scout cookies
62. gone whale watching
63. gotten flowers for no reason
64. donated blood
65. gone sky diving
66. visited a Nazi concentration camp
67. bounced a check
68. flown in a helicopter
69. saved a favorite childhood toy
70. visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. eaten caviar
72. pieced a quilt
73. stood in Times Square
74. toured the Everglades
75. been fired from a job
76. seen the changing of the guard in London
77. broken a bone
78. been on a speeding motorcycle
79. seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. published a book
81. visited the Vatican
82. bought a brand new car
83. walked in Jerusalem
84. had your picture in the newspaper
85. read the entire bible
86. visited the White House
87. killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. had chickenpox
89. saved someone’s life
90. sat on a jury
91. met someone famous
92. joined a book club
93. lost a loved one
94. had a baby
95. seen the Alamo in person
96. swum in the Great Salt Lake
97. been involved in a law suit
98. owned a cell phone
99. been stung by a bee

Want to play along? Consider yourself TAGGED!

A Christmas Meme (combined)

2008-12-02T17:26:00.005-06:00

I've combined two meme's. One from All Because I Fell in Love and one from Farm Fresh.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? If it's a "regular" shaped present, I'll wrap it...if not it goes in a gift bag.

2. Real tree or artificial? Artificial

3. When do you put up the tree? The weekend after Thanksgiving...except for this year I put it up the weekend before just to get it done.

4. When do you take the tree down? Usually the weekend after New Years.

5. Hot chocolate or apple cider? Apple Cider

6. Favorite gift received as a child? Nothing stands out in my mind...that's horrible!

7. Do you have a nativity scene? Yes

8. Hardest person to buy for? Mel

9. Easiest person to buy for? K

10. Worst Christmas gift ever received? Once again, nothing stands out in my mind.

11. Mail or e-mail Christmas card? MAIL

12. Favorite Christmas movie? A Christmas Story

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? I catch sales throughout the year.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Who hasn't?

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? The peanut butter cookies with the kisses in them.

16. Clear lights or colored? Clear

17. Favorite Christmas songs? O Holy Night

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home? Depends on the weather...

19. Can you name Santa's reindeer? Yes

20. Angel or star on top of the tree? Neither...it's a Santa.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? Depends where we are Christmas Eve. If at home, we open one present and then the rest Christmas morning.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Crowds!!!

23. Favorite ornament theme or color? I'm really into the light blue and red combo.

24. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Egg Nog...but the salted carmel hot chocolate from Starbucks is pretty tasty.

25.Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Wrap

26. Do you hang mistletoe? No

27. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)? There is something other than desserts????

28.When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? I don't remember

29. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? White lights, Hallmark Santa and Mischievous kitten ornaments, family ornaments and some colored balls. A santa on top because I have never found an angel or star that I really liked.

30. Snow. Love it or dread it? Had my share of it growing up in IL. Don't care if I ever see another snow shovel...

31. Can you ice skate? Yep

32. What is the most important thing about the holidays to you? Being with family/friends.

33. What is your favorite holiday tradition? The Advent calendar

34. Which do you prefer giving or receiving? Both

35. Candy Canes. Yum or Yuck? Yuck...unless they're crushed on peppermint bark!

36. What do you want for Christmas? Amazon gift cards...I want to save up for a Dyson Animal and a new Nikon. Funky scarf, Definitely Maybe DVD and a K-cup holder/tower thing...

37. Do you attend an annual Christmas party? An annual party...no, but usually there's one or two that we are invited to (they just aren't an annual thing).

38. Do you dress up for Christmas Eve or wear PJ's? Depends where we are.

39. Do you own a Santa hat? Did...Added it to the donate bag this year...it never gets used.

40. Who do you normally spend Christmas with? S, K and whatever family we are with.

If you'd like to join in...you're tagged.

Clever Christmas gift idea...

2008-10-16T12:01:00.002-05:00

At least I thought it was... A friend was telling me about a co-worker's Christmas tradition. The children get four gifts:

Something you Want
Something you Need
Something to Wear
Something to Read

In this world of crazy gift giving, I thought it was a great idea!

glam R baby

2008-10-16T11:43:00.004-05:00

Noelle of glam R baby is giving away an awesome Halloween top. She's been designing some fierce products for a while, but she's a newbie to the blogging world. Go show her some love and sign up for a fabulous giveaway. Contest ends October 20th. Check her out on myspace....tons of pictures!

Ornament Exchange

2008-10-16T11:37:00.004-05:00

PamperingBeki is hosting an ornament exchange. What fun this should be! Hurry, you must sign up by October 25th to participate.

What do y'all read?

2008-09-24T12:54:00.003-05:00

Once K was old enough to pick out a book to read, the book of choice was Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel. Now I know how my mother felt! It didn't take too much of that to make us head to the library. Our library has a list of 30 titles every child should know. We own quite a few of them (listed in bold).

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
The Mitten by Jan Brett
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown
Mr. Gumpy’s Outing by John Burningham
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin
Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola
Olivia by Ian Falconer
Corduroy by Don Freeman
Owen by Kevin Henkes
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
Swimmy by Leo Lionni
Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin
Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey
Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss
Duck on a Bike by David Shannon
Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile by Bernard Weber
Owl Babies by Martin Waddell
The Napping House by Audrey Wood
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? By Jane Yolen
Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion

I'd of course like to add the previous mentioned Tikki, Tikki, Tembo along with:

Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg
The Cat In The Hat by Dr. Seuss
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman
The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett
Frederick by Leo Lionni
Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney
Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff

What do y'all read? Any MUST HAVE suggestions for a first grader?

Wordless Wednesday ~ A Dog's Life at Our House

2008-09-10T09:14:00.001-05:00

We fry everything in Texas

2008-09-02T15:48:00.003-05:00

I saw in the Dallas Morning News today that the winner of this year's State Fair fried food contest is chicken fried bacon....uck. That just sounds horribly disgusting to me. The fried grilled cheese or deep fried smores sound a little more appetizing. As for the fried Jelly Bellys, that just sounds like a waste of grease.

Labor Day weekend

2008-09-02T15:26:00.005-05:00

I spent most of yesterday cleaning out the guest bedroom closet. How in the world I can accumulate so much stuff I will never know. Going to try to list some of it on e-bay tonight. Does anyone else have TOTES of holiday decorations? I used to be so deligent at decorating throughout the year...not anymore. I'm lucky to get the Halloween candy bowl out...and don't get me started on the Christmas tree. In my dream home, I'm going to have a closet I can wheel that thing in and out of. No more putting it up, fluffing the branches, stringing the lights, hanging the ornaments...only to take it all down. I threw out so many Easter baskets/containers. I really need to look at buying one "permanent" basket and using it for the next several years. I like this one from Good Pails to Have
It's springy, yet could be used for something else once the whole Easter Bunny thing is over. Elexis of Good Pails sent me some handmade magnets and thumb tacks and they were just the cutest thing. Now our message board is stylin'!

This is how we roll...

2008-08-28T09:28:00.004-05:00

At least this is how the chicks roll... Daddy drives a red F150 crew cab.

Ooh La La...

2008-07-30T09:35:00.003-05:00

Leave it to a fellow Texas gal to host a give-a-way like this!

It's been forever...

2008-07-24T10:46:00.005-05:00

Spring time is our BUSY season at work (fieldwork wise)...which translates into the summer being ridiculous for the engineers!

There is a new craze in digital scrapbooking that I thought was pretty cool. I downloaded a few templates for that just in case moment. That is until I saw this template by Jaye. I had the PERFECT picture...thanks to Brandi's awsome work!

Leaving at noon today to go see Buckcherry in concert...so excited!

Thanks Uncle Sam

2008-05-14T13:41:00.003-05:00

Last night I did my part to stimulate the economy. Most of my economic incentive check will be donated to the dentist for a crown on my tooth, but that just didn't seem all that fun. So I went to the store and came home with this:

It was already wrapped. Wrapped or unwrapped was the same price...why pass up the opportunity to get a piece of ribbon I can use on another package! What is underneath that beautiful ribbon?

The panini maker Oprah had on her favorite things 2007 list! No I do not have unlimited storage space in the kitchen, so the breadmaker that never gets used is on it's way to Goodwill...

The cutest purse

2008-05-14T13:35:00.002-05:00

I just had to show y'all what I bought on etsy a month or so ago. It's just the cutest purse! I carried it when we went to the Edgefest concert and it was the perfect size for a camera, credit card, cash and keys. Spirited Style has some awesome funky fabrics...check them out!

THANK YOUS!!!!

2008-05-14T13:00:00.007-05:00

I am so horribly late posting a few thank you's and shout outs. Each day I think, "I need to update my blog", then the day comes and goes and it doesn't seem to get done. The same thing seems to happen to me with phone calls... They found a way to give us an extra few days during daylight savings time, why can't they find a way to put more than 24 hours in a day????

First I need to thank Ribbon Rock Star for the Sweet and Tranquil soap giveaway she had a while back. Sorry no picture...but it looked great in the shower and was YUMMY smelling!

Next up is a big thanks to The Full Mommy and Beansoup for the apron giveaway. The chef apron was absolutely adorable!

Diana of Ladybug Limited makes some of the cutest hair clippies. They arrived perfectly and uber fast. Check them out!

And last, but certainly not least Ellinghouse for hosting the Froggy Girl Designs giveaway! I won my very own rice pad. ...Several of my friends have bought them at craft shows over the years, but I've never owned one. The fabric is super cute! I can't say that I'm looking forward to having to use it (you know what I mean), but it'll sure be handy...especially during a particular time of the month

Life is Good again....

2008-04-15T11:26:00.003-05:00

New dishwasher is installed...time to PARTAY!!!! I went to my always trusty consumersearch.com and decided on the Kenmore 1374. LOVE IT!!! The turbo wash zone RAWKS....casserole dish, not a problem. Just face it towards the turbo jets, set on pots and pans setting and it comes out clean as a whistle. I'm not sure what all the other settings are for...smart wash, sani-rinse, high-temp wash. All I know is the dish rags are once again retired to the drawer!

Texas Size Cupcake

2008-04-02T10:05:00.007-05:00

I saw this pan the other day at the grocery store of all places.

How cool is that...A ginormous cupcake!

I think a trip to Michael's is in order to see if they have one there (so I could use a coupon of course!)

I wanna go back to bed

2008-03-18T09:58:00.002-05:00

It's raining, I loaded the dishwasher to the max only to find out it isn't working and my neighbor found some guy sleeping in the alley behind their house. What a wonderful Tuesday...

I need these like I need a hole in the head....

2008-03-17T11:29:00.006-05:00

So I have my china set, Grandma's, Mom's Johnson Bros. Christmas set and a set of Fiesta I use for everyday. BUT, these are just too cool!

Varsity China has a whole line of University plates. Even a few for that other school. I'm telling myself I need to wait until they add another A&M plate. That way I'd have a set of four...

Dallas Blooms

2008-03-17T11:01:00.013-05:00

The Dallas Blooms festival is happening at the Arboretum right now. K and I visited yesterday while Daddy was at work. This year's theme is The Star of Texas. The topiary wasn't in full bloom, but still cool. Anything with the Texas star has to be cool...unless it's associated with that Longhorn School.

And who doesn't love rolling down a giant grassy hill....

Trip to Tucson

2008-03-07T16:40:00.005-06:00

Dh and I were in Tucson earlier this month visiting the folks. The highlight of the trip was sitting in a corporate booth on the 13th green during Thursday's round of the Accenture Match Play. No cameras allowed, so no pictures. Here's on of the entrance to the Dove Mountain community.

However, I did manage to get an up close look at Tiger's golf bag and figure out what the heck the other headcover is on his clubs....Frank the tiger, but what the heck was that brown thing. I could never figure it out from the tv camera shots. Hello...it's a Kiwi, geez, why couldn't I see that... His caddy Steve is a Kiwi and the proceeds go to his foundation. I believe next year the tournament will be held on the new golf course at the Ritz.

Mom and I had a great time tooling around shopping, eating and checking out Biosphere 2....since it is now being leased to U of A. Dh and Dad spent their days golfing, no not with Tiger.

I know why I didn't take the GRE

2008-03-07T16:32:00.003-06:00

I finally checked out freerice.org after reading about it and seeing it on the news. I've managed to consistently stay at level 35, but never get any higher. Guess that's why I didn't take the GRE and go on to grad school. Being an engineer in the sewer industry doesn't take a ginormous vocabulary...

It is rather addicitive though, and what a cool idea!

Christmas Pictures

2008-02-28T13:35:00.004-06:00

So I finally downloaded the Christmas pictures off the camera before something happened and they disappeared. We seemed to have a shoe theme going on at the house this year...just happened that way I guess. Kirstin loved her "boots with the fur" and Heeleys. Although, the Heeleys took a little getting used to...

BIG thanks to Ribbon Rock Star and Mommy Cracked

2008-02-28T13:20:00.005-06:00

This is a long overdue thank you to Linda over at Ribbon Rock Star. I won one of her reindeer clippies from Mommy Cracked during the Southern Christmas give-a-way. I had to snag the picture from Mommy Cracked as Makenna, my best friends little girl, would not keep it in her hair long enough to take a picture. She prefers the Donald Trump hairdo. DO NOT tell her it'll be pretty, she'll look just like a princess. The response will be "I NOT A PRINCESS!"

Thank you Ribbon Rock Star and Mommy Cracked!!!

Tomorrow's the BIG DAY

2008-02-01T09:17:00.000-06:00

You will not believe how excited I was when I received an e-mail from Build-a-Bear with their latest limited edition...that's right it's a GROUNDHOG! This 30-something gal had to go make hers right away. Yes, his name is Phil...what else would you name a groundhog...and I changed his birthday to February 2nd. After all, I have been to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to see the little guy...not on the big day, but on one of our family vacations.

Here's a little diddy I still remember from day care to celebrate the glorious day:

It's goundhog's day, it's groundhog's day
If he sees his shadow, he will run away
But if he doesn't, spring is here to say
It's groundhog's day, it's groundhog's day

GO RED

2008-02-01T08:42:00.000-06:00

Darnit! I forgot to wear my red today. But, I do have on a pink sweater and my Brighton breast cancer awareness bracelet...so I am showing support today, just the wrong color.

Why isn't my butt disappearing???

2008-01-15T12:43:00.000-06:00

I've been workin' it off and it's not leaving! Oh yeah, wrong kind of work. I can't wait til the middle of January when I promised to have this report done...oh yeah it is the middle of January. Ok, I want next week to be over, but wait, I need every second of it to get my work done! Ugh, I just want time to download the Christmas pictures from the camera, maybe even upload a couple. Getting them printed, well that may have to wait till June...not really...

Killing two birds with one stone

2008-01-10T11:17:00.000-06:00

Ok, I think I've figured out a way to encourage myself to lose a little weight and justify spending a few bucks at LUSH. For every ten pounds I lose, I'm going to allow myself to buy $10 in product. So when the bath bombs run out, I'd better get to losing some more weight! Hopefully I see a lot of these in my future....

Who would have thought...sewers in Texas Monthly

2007-11-29T14:28:00.000-06:00

Texas Monthly December 2007

“Down the drain, off the brain” is how most people think about it, but human waste—or effluent, as the professionals call it—has a lot to tell us about how we live, what we eat, and who we are.
by Nate Blakeslee

They say that shit runs downhill. This is commonly understood to mean that the world is an unfair place, except among those few people who actually work with the substance, for whom it is considered something of an article of faith. This is because municipal sewerage systems are powered almost entirely by gravity, which means that when working properly, they move millions of gallons of sewage a day across considerable distances with only a minimum expenditure of energy, a feat of efficiency virtually unparalleled in the annals of engineering. When sewage stops running downhill, as it inevitably does from time to time, very bad things indeed can happen, as they did on Pecan Springs Road, in the Austin neighborhood known as Windsor Park, one morning last September.

I was spending the day with an Austin Water Utility emergency-response crew when dispatch got a call from a woman reporting that two rooms of her house were flooded with sewage. Our crew consisted of a TV truck, piloted by a twenty-year line-maintenance veteran named David Eller, and a flusher truck, driven by another longtime utility employee, named Dale Crocker. At the house, Eller, who wears wraparound sunglasses and looks a little like the country singer Dwight Yoakam, unspooled a thick red cable from the back of his truck. On the end of the cable was a camera about the size of a roll of quarters, which Crocker shoved down into a PVC clean-out pipe near the curb in the front yard. The woman leaned on a walker in her driveway, looking worried.

The pipe came into view on a screen mounted near the truck’s rear doors. The walls of the pipe were colored a pleasing aquamarine, and the inside looked remarkably clean as the camera moved slowly forward, scudding along through the trickle of water on the bottom of the pipe. After only a few feet, however, something white and fibrous appeared at the top of the screen. “Tree roots at three feet,” Eller announced.

Trees are the bane of all underground infrastructure, but they are particularly hard on wastewater systems. Tree roots end in tiny tendrils, which act as notoriously efficient water diviners, constantly probing and searching for moisture under the earth. If a pipe has even a pinhole leak, which often occurs at joints, the tree will find it and begin slowly working its way into the opening. Root tendrils no more rigid than a stalk of celery can penetrate concrete or iron, in a sort of slow-motion version of a tornado slamming a two-by-four through a car door. There is no way to stop this, though many ideas have come and gone, including pipelines that exude their own herbicide. Once inside a pipe, roots flourish in the moisture-rich environment, eventually forming dense root-balls through which solids cannot pass.

In this case, the culprit was almost certainly a fifty-foot cottonwood in the middle of the front yard. A few feet past the root-ball, Eller detected a wastewater-filled sag in the line, probably caused by roots from the same tree pressing down on the top of the pipe. The root-ball was the most likely cause of the clog, but a sagging pipe can spell trouble down the road for a property owner—or PO, as the line crews call them—if it gets worse and causes the line to break. Still, Eller assured me that the woman had gotten off easy. Clogs in sewer mains—the larger lines that run under the street collecting sewage from the smaller service laterals that connect to homes—can be much worse. If you happen to live just upstream of the spot where the main in your street is clogged, what backs up in your toilet is not just your own sewage but your neighbors’ too. Like all flooding victims, the lower you are in the topography of your neighborhood, the worse you get it. Eller recalled one emergency he went out on last year in East Austin. “This guy indicated to me that shit water was shooting out of his toilet with five hundred roaches coming out of it,” he said, outlining with his arms an imaginary column of brown water and roaches.

“Worst I ever saw was off of Salton Drive,” Eller continued. In that incident, a main had been completely eaten out by hydrogen sulfide, an acidic gas that collects in pipes that are not flowing well. Over time, hydrogen sulfide can turn concrete into a porridge-like mush. Another component of sewer gas, methane, can be poisonous to breathe at high-enough concentrations. Last July, a farmer in Virginia walked down into a holding pit of liquefied cow manure and hit an invisible pocket of methane so concentrated that he instantly dropped dead. When his wife and two daughters went down to retrieve him, they dropped dead too. On Salton Drive, the gas had been so potent that the main was simply gone. “Must have flooded sixteen homes,” Eller recalled. “I mean, it was a foot up on the sides of their houses. The street was just full of water, women’s products floatin’ everywhere. The POs were freakin’ out.”

A flusher truck carries an array of obstruction-busting nozzles, each designed for a different type of blockage and a different size of pipe. The larger ones are two feet long and weigh upward of thirty pounds. Crocker showed me his collection of smaller, service-lateral-size nozzles, stainless-steel implements of destruction that he kept in a padded case reminiscent of something Q would hand 007 in the first act of a Bond movie. For this job Crocker chose a Warthog, a shiny four-inch-long device shaped like a fifties pencil sharpener. The Warthog screws onto the end of a hose and spins around like crazy when you send water through it, cutting up roots and whatever else might get in its way. If it were not inside the pipe when you turned on the water, the Warthog would whip around like one of those front-yard water toys kids used to play with, except that if it hit you, it would kill you.

Crocker snaked the Warthog down into the clean-out on the end of a long black hose and began blasting the pipe with water from the flusher’s giant tank. After a few minutes, he reinserted the camera to see what he had accomplished. The PO hobbled over to the rear of the truck to look at the monitor. Awakened by the rumbling of the flusher truck, a neighbor who worked nights came out in his shorts and bare feet to see what was going on. He was about thirty years old and had a long ponytail and several days’ worth of stubble on his jaw. Presently, our small audience was joined by a woman in a nicely tailored skirt and an older man, who had been walking the block. We all stood around the back of the truck, watching transfixed as the camera snaked along through the aquamarine PVC pipe, which was now mostly dry and clear of roots. “This is like a colonoscopy,” the older man said. When the camera came once again to the sag, still partially filled with water, there was a perversely satisfied “Hmm” from the audience, as though we had just watched Bob Vila find a termite pile on This Old House.

“Plumbing is some freaky shit,” the ponytailed neighbor said, and everyone nodded.

Sewerage is the sine qua non of urban life. London, the first megacity, might not have survived the nineteenth century had a medical researcher named John Snow not correctly theorized that recurring cholera epidemics were caused not, as was commonly believed, by the inescapable smell of raw sewage that plagued every corner of the city but by the bacteria leaking from countless overflowing cesspools into wells and streams used for drinking water. London eventually replaced its army of shovel-toting cesspool muckers with a citywide sewer system, which drastically reduced the incidence of disease and became known throughout the Western world as one of the marvels of the Industrial Age, though it was in reality not much more advanced than the system devised by the Romans more than two thousand years earlier. Today, at least three million deaths worldwide are caused each year by waterborne germs—mostly attributable to poor sewage disposal—and access to clean water remains a bellwether of development. In the neighborhoods of Baghdad, the presence of raw sewage in the streets four years after the American invasion, at least as much as rolling blackouts and roadside bombs, has come to symbolize the power of the insurgency and the ineffectiveness of reconstruction efforts.

If sewerage is the cornerstone of civilization, then ours is a civilization in decline. Decades of neglect and postponed maintenance have left an estimated $500 billion in needed repairs and upgrades to wastewater pipelines and treatment plants nationwide. Overflows, and illnesses related to overflows, are becoming increasingly common, yet there remains a general reluctance by municipal governments to raise taxes to invest in something that most residents take for granted. Decaying roads and bridges are symptoms of the same problem, though potholes are more visible to taxpayers than leaking pipes, and total failures—like the bridge disaster in Minneapolis—are much more spectacular. The problem is exacerbated in boomtowns like Austin, which has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the country since the late eighties. In 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the City of Austin to take drastic measures after a series of overflows, the worst of which was a massive spill into a stream called Brushy Creek that sickened 1,400 residents in suburban northwest Austin. The city is now in the fourth year of an eight-year, $350 million overhaul of its pipelines and by all accounts has already substantially reduced the number of overflows. When Eller first started working on an emergency crew two years ago, he was getting up to fifteen calls a day. Now the crews generally get fewer than half that number.

Partly, this is due to technological advances. At the headquarters of Austin Water Utility, an engineer technician spends eight hours a day watching recordings of the insides of sewer lines made by one of the city’s ten television inspection crews, assessing and prioritizing repair needs. Aside from the occasional camera-riding snake, lost armadillo, or rabid rat attack, the footage is unbelievably monotonous, but it is a key part of a program that has brought some order to a system that relied for years on the experience of a handful of employees who began their careers when Austin was a much smaller city.

Trying to get a handle on the vast network of underground infrastructure in a rapidly growing city like Austin is a bit like trying to master the basic code for an old piece of software like Microsoft Windows, which is so complex and has been patched and modified so many times by so many different programmers that nobody really knows exactly how it works. There are thousands of miles of lines in Austin, and new mains are constantly being added by developers building subdivisions, such that no one person or database can claim to know everything there is to know about the system. It is not uncommon for crews digging in older parts of the city, such as downtown, to come across old clay lines or brick manholes that are still in use but not on any map.

Even when maps are accurate, in such a complex system, mistakes will be made. Plumbers have been known to inadvertently tap into the storm sewer—a separate system of pipes designed to drain rainwater off roads—thereby hooking a household’s sinks, showers, and toilets right into the nearest creek. Several years ago, a plumbing contractor for a new subdivision in San Antonio connected to a system carrying partially treated water meant for irrigating medians and golf courses, thinking it was a city water main. Before the mistake was discovered, new residents had been bathing in and drinking non-potable water for weeks. Finally, a property owner complained to the city that the water didn’t taste right.

Sometimes the only indication that something has gone terribly wrong underground is when odd things—like big chunks of concrete—begin turning up at a wastewater treatment plant, the end of the line for sewers. A few years ago, a plastic liner failed in one of Austin’s largest wastewater interceptors, known as the Onion Creek Tunnel, which stretches for miles deep beneath the southern half of the city. Interceptors, which collect wastewater from thousands of mains, are like underground rivers; at peak flow hours, sewage howls through them at an alarming rate. In order to do a full inspection of a tunnel this large, crews will sometimes enter one end in a boat and float downstream to the other end. In the course of investigating the failed Onion Creek liner, inspectors discovered that a telecommunications company had unwittingly bored right through the upper portion of the seven-foot-diameter tunnel using remote-controlled digging equipment.

With the exception of a few big interceptor tunnels, however, most modern sewer lines are not large enough for people to get inside and have a look, which has historically made it extremely difficult to find out where exactly a leaking pipe has failed—and why. As one engineer put it in the March 2007 issue of the journal Underground Construction: “In 1969, we knew more about the dark side of the Moon than about the inside of small diameter sewer pipes.” The advent in the early eighties of TV inspection—including remote-controlled robotic cameras that could crawl hundreds of feet through mains—began to change that, and the business of line maintenance, formerly about sweat, hard-won experience, and a strong stomach, has now become a gadget-intensive job.

In recent years, for example, Austin Water Utility has placed dozens of electronic flow meters in pipes all across the city. The meters, sophisticated devices that measure how much wastewater is present in a pipe and how fast it is flowing, are all remotely monitored on a set of four flat screens that sit on the ample desk of an engineering associate named Robert Cameron. A typical 24-hour chart for a given flow meter looks like an EKG, with two big spikes—one around seven in the morning, when people wake up and have a morning shower and purge, and another in the evening, as supper dishes are washed and another round of bathing takes place. Cameron, who has a beer belly and keeps a can of Copenhagen always within reach, reads the charts like a doctor reads a pulse; anomalous data can point to a problem in the system. He showed me the chart for May 28, which had an unusual spike in the mid-morning. “Big storm,” he said. Heavy rains can infiltrate and overload cracked wastewater lines, causing overflows. Yet rain is also an invaluable diagnostic tool: Using the flow meters, Cameron can track infiltration during heavy rains and identify areas where repairs are needed.

A flow meter is a surprisingly reliable recorder of human behavior. An experienced wastewater engineer can look at the chart from a flow meter downstream of a football stadium and tell you when halftime occurred and whether the game was a blowout or a nail-biter that kept everyone in his or her seat until the final whistle. In a paper titled “Sewer Sociology,” engineers Kevin L. Enfinger and Patrick L. Stevens examined records from flow meters in Houston on the eve of Hurricane Rita during one of the largest—and most ineffective—evacuations in U.S. history. Nobody really knows how many people tried to leave Houston that day, but the sewers may have provided the best guess: In the neighborhood examined by Enfinger and Stevens, the flow was down 36 percent.

If there is one area of human behavior that continues to baffle wastewater engineers and operators, it is the seemingly endless variety of things people will flush down a toilet or, for the more determined utility customer, shove into a manhole. Bedsheets from a mental hospital. Rags soaked in every kind of substance you can imagine. Dead parakeets, dead hamsters, dead mice, dead pit bulls. Fish, alive or dead. Engagement rings (by accident—usually). Broken glass, cocaine, battery acid, rocks. Even shopping carts and wheelbarrows. These things are not gone forever. If they don’t get stuck in a pipe, most of them wash up on a metal bar screen in the headworks of a wastewater treatment plant, like the one at the Walnut Creek plant, in East Austin, where I stood one day last May and watched the screens being cleared by a pair of long robotic arms. Every few minutes, the arms crept up out of churning pools of murky water, hauling up loads of trash freshly scraped off the screens hidden in the rushing water below. I had to fight a powerful urge to step away from the open pools and back into the sunlight, yet at the same time, there was something weirdly fascinating about the machine’s methodical dredging, and I found myself lingering to see what would come out of the water next. It could have been anything. As it happened, the majority of the detritus consisted of two pretty mundane items: condoms and tampon applicators.

According to my guide, Raj Bhattarai, the manager of Austin Water Utility’s environmental and regulatory services division, an aversion to foul-smelling water is a product of human evolution: Over the millennia, our ancestors who learned to avoid bacteria-laden water were more likely to survive. This means that sewer workers have to learn to ignore their innate survival instincts, though most of the veterans I talked to insisted that the smell was not that bad—much more tolerable than, say, the odor of a landfill. Most people would not make such a subtle distinction, which is why the primary treatment portion of the Walnut Creek plant—that is, the smelliest part—was built entirely underground, a fairly new innovation when the plant was constructed in the late seventies.

Bhattarai, a short, balding man in his mid-fifties given to bad puns and fits of giggling, joined the utility seven years after the plant opened. He was born and raised in Nepal, where his father was a justice on the supreme court. Bhattarai was accepted to a prestigious engineering-and-science academy in India at a time when modernization was making heroes out of people who knew how to build things like highways, bridges, and dams. The most fascinating new field for Bhattarai, who grew up in a country without a single wastewater treatment plant, was sewerage. While most of the guys on the trucks I met wanted to know why I was even interested in the subject to begin with, Bhattarai launched right into a pen-and-ink diagram of how a treatment plant works and then proceeded to talk about wastewater for the next seven hours, along with many digressions into his ideas about recycling, pollution, public transportation, and bottled water, which he considers the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.

Much of my tour of the plant was spent in dimly lit, dank-smelling underground chambers filled with tiny gnats and the sound of roaring water, where I struggled to hear Bhattarai explain the automated operation of machines with names like “scum beach” and “sludge pig.” Then he led me back outdoors, to the aeration basins, where the true genius of a modern wastewater treatment plant is found. The basins are huge concrete tanks where the partially treated sewage is roiled by thousands of air diffusers. Bacteria is the primary problem wastewater engineering was created to solve, but in the tanks it is actually encouraged to grow, as part of a sort of engineering jujitsu. In a natural setting, like a stream, bacteria from raw sewage will consume the dissolved oxygen in the water molecule by molecule until there is none left and the fish start to die. Once the dissolved oxygen is gone, the bacteria begin extracting oxygen from sulfates in the stream. The water turns black and starts emitting hydrogen sulfide, which is what gives a dead body of water its unmistakable rotten-egg smell.

If, on the other hand, the bacteria have a steady flow of oxygen, as they get in the aeration basins, something else happens. By way of explanation, Bhattarai hooked a tall plastic beaker onto the end of a long pole and dipped it into the frothing liquor in the basin. After a few minutes, the mixture in the beaker had separated into a top layer of clear liquid and a bottom layer of what looked like a loose pile of watery brown snowflakes. These were bundles of microscopic bacteria, known as flocs, gathered together in such huge numbers that they could actually be seen with the naked eye. “They are providing the treatment,” Bhattarai said. “And also the product of the treatment.” The flocs form around soluble and colloidal (greaselike) particles in the sewage, which have little weight and don’t tend to separate from the water on their own. Over time the flocs drag these particles to the bottom of the basins and form a layer of sludge, which is sucked out and piped away.

This is known as “activated sludge.” To make sure the microorganism population in the tanks remains vigorous, a portion of it is returned to the tanks, to act as a kind of yeast or roux for the next mixture. Once the process is up and running, it is relatively maintenance-free. “Salesmen will call from time to time pitching a new kind of bug, one that will do this or that for your plant,” Bhattarai scoffed. “The bugs we have are easy to keep happy.” Rarely, a bad batch of bacteria—for instance, one that forms flocs that tend to float instead of sink—will inhabit the aeration basins. When this happens, the offending tank is drained, and activated sludge from another tank is dumped in, to begin a fresh batch.

Bhattarai spends most of his time thinking up ways to make the plant run more efficiently. At the end of our tour, he took me to visit his pride and joy, a sludge thickener that he had helped redesign, resulting in a much more effective device and an award-winning paper in an engineering journal. Bhattarai had also redesigned the signage, since the original plaque, which was still there, had misspelled the word “thickener.”

“I wasn’t strong enough to pull the old one out, so I just had a new one made,” he said, pointing to a sign a bit higher up the hill. “If I die and they name something after me, I want it to be this.”

“A sewer is a cynic,” wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, much of which takes place in the sewers of Paris. “It tells all.” Designed to collect both wastewater and rainwater from street-level storm drains, the original sewers of Europe, like those in older cities in the American north and Midwest, tended to have enormous tunnels, big enough to serve not only as metaphor-rich settings for novelists but also as unofficial repositories for anything anybody felt like getting rid of. In addition to the sewer men who mucked about in the tunnels under London and Paris, there was an entire caste of unfortunates—including an army of neglected children—who made their livelihood off things they found in the sewers: bits of copper, lumps of coal, even bone fragments, anything that could conceivably be resold.

Today there is a strange kind of anthropology available to students of sewage. One thing our sewers are telling us, for example, is that we are a self-medicating society. Last August, researchers at Oregon State University announced that they had studied the raw sewage of ten U.S. cities and ranked them according to the recreational drug of choice in each town: cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and so forth. The researchers would not give the names of the towns, citing promises they’d made to plant managers who granted them access, but the Drug Enforcement Administration is reportedly interested in the technology, which essentially amounts to urine testing an entire city with one sample. In a country where federal highway funds are dispensed or withheld according to the purity of air samples, it’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario in which cities that flunk their urine tests—say one part per million of crystal meth—might be similarly punished.

Many of the compounds found in recreational drugs and medicines actually survive the final chlorination and filtering process in a wastewater treatment plant and make it into nearby rivers and streams, where they flow into the water systems of other cities downstream. In this way, a dose of acetaminophen consumed in a mountain town in the Sierra Nevada eventually turns up in the digestive tracts of people living hundreds of miles away in Southern California. In 2002 the U.S. Geological Survey published the first comprehensive survey of pharmaceutical compounds found in the nation’s rivers. Some of the most common they discovered were the insect repellent DEET; triclosan, an antiseptic; and caffeine. Caffeine is a particularly good anthropogenic marker. Wastewater treatment plants remove about 99 percent of it from the waste stream, so if it is found in higher concentrations in a sample of river or lake water, you know there is a sewage leak occurring at some point in the system. Some of the most popular barbiturates of the fifties and sixties are also among the longest-lived pharmaceutical compounds. In all likelihood, some of the downers Elvis swallowed are still out there, somewhere, floating around in the ocean.

Of more concern is a class of chemicals known as endocrine disrupters, which mimic the actions of hormones and have been associated with sexual abnormalities in fish found in urban watersheds. The best-known source of such chemicals in treated wastewater is birth control pills, but a host of other chemicals, including perfume and soap additives, have now been identified as potential endocrine disrupters as well. Researchers are studying whether the presence of such chemicals in our drinking water is contributing to higher rates of diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

What we put into our bodies also has a direct effect on how well our sewers run. For instance, there is a sense in the pipeline world that concrete wastewater pipe is not lasting as long as it used to, though nobody is sure exactly why. The general consensus is that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the pipe, but that something we are doing differently aboveground is causing the waste stream to become, as the engineers say, more “aggressive.” Garbage disposals are at least partly to blame. They increase the amount of grease in the system, which slows the rate of flow in the pipes, which in turn allows more time for corrosive sewer gas to form. Other engineers point to the increase in protein consumption after World War II, when Americans began eating a lot more meat. A few years ago, during the Atkins diet craze, millions of Americans switched to a heavy-protein diet, so much so that it affected the futures market for commodities like cattle feed. If increased protein consumption really does make wastewater more aggressive, then our eating habits during the Atkins era must have put quite a stress on the nation’s sewers as well, something like putting 50,000 miles a year on your car instead of the usual 10,000.

Roy Bedichek, the great Texas naturalist, preferred to relieve himself out of doors. He believed that the advent of sewerage had broken a link in the ecological cycle, depriving the soil of vital nutrients contained in human excrement. Legend has it that even after he became an administrator at the University of Texas, he would seek out quiet places on campus to relieve himself, carrying a small trowel with him, as though he were on a camping trip. Citywide sewage collection presents an ancillary problem, one that may not have been obvious in Bedichek’s day, when Texas was still largely a rural state: Once you collect all the waste in one place, where do you put it? It’s a problem that gets worse as an area gets more urban and real estate gets more precious. New York City, for example, exports hundreds of tons of sewer sludge a year; in the nineties a good deal of it was shipped to far West Texas (on a train that came to be known locally as the “poo-poo choo-choo”), where it was spread on fields near the town of Sierra Blanca.

In the late eighties, Austin became the first city in Texas to try a new solution to this problem, in part by restoring the link Bedichek worried about decades earlier. Sludge from Walnut Creek and a second treatment plant is piped to the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Facility, located along a wide curve in the Colorado River, where a portion of the sludge is mixed with yard trimmings and turned into a compost known as Dillo Dirt. (Treated liquid from the two plants, meanwhile, goes into the Colorado River.) The compost is sold by the truckload, mostly to retailers and landscaping firms, which use it as a topsoil supplement. The organic content of topsoil—that is, the portion that sustains growing things—has declined in Central Texas, as it has everywhere in the U.S., in response to the pressures of farming and ranching, as well as erosion caused by development. Increasingly, topsoil has become a nonrenewable resource. “People look at it as gravel, instead of as a living thing,” said Jody Slagle, a manager at the Hornsby Bend facility.

Hornsby Bend also has a series of lagoons where excess liquid from the sludge is naturally—and gradually—treated by plants and animals that live in the water. Located on the site of Travis County’s first white settlement, it is a quiet and peaceful place, one that has become unexpectedly appealing to wildlife and observers of wildlife. Researchers from the University of Texas study leaf-cutter ants and dragonflies along the banks of the river, and thanks in part to the efforts of Slagle and a geographer named Kevin Anderson, the facility has become one of the top bird-watching sites in the state. Meanwhile, Anderson, who is writing his dissertation on what he calls “marginal nature,” is compiling a photographic record of all the organisms found in the soil.

Currently, approximately one third of Austin’s sludge is turned into Dillo Dirt; the rest is applied to hay fields surrounding Hornsby Bend. But Slagle would like to see all of it go to compost. “It could be one of the biggest keys to our future—if we can seamlessly integrate our waste into these cycles,” he said. Many Austinites are still leery of using human waste to fertilize their own yards, however. It’s the old instinct kicking in. “The closer it gets to their house,” Bhattarai explained, “the more they say, ‘I don’t think so.’”

A snipit of Kirstin's photo shoot

2007-11-06T14:33:00.000-06:00

One of my faves...

Sweet princess

Sassy!!!

What a pout!

Chili Cook-off

2007-11-05T15:19:00.000-06:00

Sean had a chili cook-off at work two weeks ago. Here's the recipe we came up with for his team. It's definitely not for those who can't stand the heat...

Sean’s BYA (bite yo' a$$) Chili

Ingredients

2 onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb. ground beef
¾ lb. spicy Italian sausage, casing removed [Super Target has it in ¾ lb. packages already ground]
1 (14.5 oz.) can diced tomatoes with juice
1 (12 oz.) bottle dark beer [I use Guiness]
1 cp. strong brewed coffee
2 (6 oz.) cans tomato paste
1 (14 oz.) can beef broth
¼ cp. chili powder
1 Tbs. cumin
¼ cp. brown sugar [I probably use closer to 1/8 cp.]
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 tsp. coriander
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. wasabi paste [I have found at Central Market]
1 Tbs. vegetable oil
2 anaheim chili peppers, chopped [seeds removed]
1 serrano pepper, chopped [seeds removed]
1 habanero pepper, chopped [seeds removed]

Directions

Cook onions, garlic, beef and sausage in a large pot over medium heat until meat is browned. Drain. Pour in tomatoes, beer, coffee, tomato paste and broth. Season with chili powder, cumin, sugar (I’d start with half), oregano, cayenne, coriander, salt and wasabi. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer.

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Cook peppers until just tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Stir into pot (try not to add too much of the oil). Simmer covered 2 hours. Uncover and simmer until desired consistency (about another 30 to 45 minutes).