Poo and Pee: February in Alaska

With an outhouse sometimes you need a reminder to bring out the essentials...


"Penelopee, the miniature moose"


If it ain't one thing it's another. We needed to fill up our water tank (did we mention we have a one thousand gallon water tank buried somewhere under the frozen ground around our cabin??). Every 2-3 months we go to the pump station with our landlord who lets us use his 500 gallon water tank mounted on his trailer. It took an especially long time to get the water last night (450 gallons = a mere $7 at our local pump station) but you can't put a price on hauling a fully loaded water tank up a steep grade on icy roads on a Monday night against the time clock of freezing temperatures to a cabin nine miles hence tucked into a narrow driveway surrounded by trees through which you have to maneuver and thread 30 or so feet of hose to connect to the underground reservoir. It involved endless backing and forwarding of Simon's pickup, plus some last-minute landscaping (snow shoveling, sawing away of small obstacles, etc etc) and by 10:30 PM---VOILA! Gallons and gallons of water!

Except now the pump in our cabin seems to be broken |:-{

Thank god for bottled water and baby wipes {:-(

Not to confuse you, we don't use a drop of our water for the toilet. It's strictly for drinking, cooking and bathing. The outhouse is just good old-fashioned 19th century no-flush "technology". In fact the most modern thing we use in there is 21st century toilet paper.

Oh, and the cute little moose in our yard we named "Penelopee" (Me: "Was it a boy moose or a girl?" Joe: "Well, when it peed in our yard it peed like a girl.")