Toilets I have known.

We've got all sorts of lovely vacation photos to download, and ballet pics to share, and fun heartwarming stories, but until our technology catches up with us, I'm going to share a few toilet classification ideas.

First, we travelled to Seattle, and then we went camping, at a campground, and spent a few days at Glacier National Park. Then I ran a 10K this morning, and the kids and I spent the day at the adjacent city beach. This has entailed a LOT of public toilets. I submit that the following questions must be asked when one is evaluating a public toilet (on merits other than cleanliness, which really speaks for itself and does not warrent analysis.)

One: Does it flush? If no, you are probably using either an outhouse or a porta potty. Outhouses come in basically two varieties: with enclosure, or without. This week, we have used the former, but not the latter. It was at the trailhead for the Trail of the Cedars in Glacier, which we didn't happen to hike this time around, but it was a close stop when we had an urgent potty need. Outdoor outhouses are typically in sparsely populated regions, which we're not quite ready to camp in yet.

Outhouses are the toilet of choice for events like organized footraces, and they also come in two varieties: with hand sanitizer (highly preferred!) or without (which is just awful.) Luckily, the 10K I ran had the first kind. Unluckily, the only one at the top of the mountain where I waited for the start of the race with a hundred or so other people for an hour was *locked.* An enterprising and desparate runner jimmied it open, and although the lock was damaged, nobody cared. Some people just used the bushes instead, but that's usually a last choice as far as I'm concerned.

Flushing toilets, it turns out, also come in more than one variety. There are multi-option flushers, designed for maximum water efficiency. Our beloved aunt and uncle have one, and I saw one this week in the new visitors' center outside of Apgar, complete with a set of instructions that included the phrases "number one" and "number two." I have never before seen this on a government-issued sign.

There are also fancy Swedish flushing toilets with knobs on the top of the tank, which we saw in the restrooms at the top of Logan Pass, a hair-raising drive up the mountain in Glacier but totally worth it (funny photos, not with toilets, coming soon.) The goal here is also water use efficiency, and they also came with instructions to PULL the knob, and to NEVER twist or push it.

Another interesting question that isn't quite toilet-specific: what kind of handwashing options exist? We saw three at various campground restrooms: one was soap and cold water, one was hand sanitizer and cold water, and one was cold water on its own. This ranks between the porta-potty-no-hand-sanitizer option and the porta-potty-hand-sanitizer - better than the first, but not quite as good as the second in terms of your confidence when exiting that you're suitable for society again. (Reminder: we're not talking basic cleanliness here; clearly the porta-potties would rank (!) below the flush toilets in any comparison along those lines.)

Finally, we happend to need a toilet at a gas station in a little town 16 miles from the freeway (don't ask) in Washington State, and the guy running the gas station let us use it even though he's technically supposed to direct people over to the nearby Wal-Mart. We opened up the door to the little office building attached to the gas pump structure, and found a toilet... with no stall door. Just office, toilet, sink, mop closet. It was clean enough, and with plenty of soap, but the total lack of door made it clear why this really didn't qualify as "a restroom."

Aren't you thankful there are no visuals for the above discussion?

editing to add: my 10K time was 57:10, or 9:13/miles, which is about a four minute gain over my previous 10K time from last fall. I'm itching to do a 5K again to see if I can do sub-nine-minute miles - a modest goal, but it would be a huge gain from my first race.

We dine alfesco

On our way home from Minnesota this week, tired and sad and wrung out, we stopped on our side of Des Moines at this organic farm restaurant. It was ... not what I expected, although it was perfectly clean and the food was delicious. We were also the only customers, and the outside dining option was a long picnic table under a tree. While we waited, the kids wandered around to check out the free-range chickens (who were yummy, I must confess) and the crops. This is the part where it got confusing, since it seemed very much like what a working farm is not. There were plants, but they were planted in PVC pipe (four feet off the ground, with soil filling the pipe, as near as I could tell) or in the openings in cinder blocks which were lined up neatly along the driveway. They didn't feel really like crops as much as - garden gone wild. The establishment was also apparently a CSA (for Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy a share upfront and get produce all summer long.) Maybe we didn't get a good enough look at what was going on, or we were just too tired to properly appreciate how innovative their agriculture was, but we felt somewhat confused by it all. However, the food was so much better than anything we could have scavaged for ourselves from a fast food place, and the kids were happy to scamper around taking pictures of things they saw. Grace reported that "approximately 3/4 of the tomato plants had little green tomatos already," which is promising indeed!

Next up: a blog about Grace's dance rehearsal (a mere 5.5 hours of non-stop fun!) that will include the words "bustier" and "vampire teeth" to describe one number.

Delightful birdie update.

Regular readers of this blog (at least three... I can tell) will no doubt remember the Easter morning drama of the babie birdies upended from their nest. (Short version: my fault; nest in Christmas wreath; birds fine.)

Today, my amateur ornithologist, Grace, noted the teeny and ultra-fluffy robin perched on our front-porch railing. We watched carefully through the front door, and saw the parent bird (a robin, as even I can see) come several times over the course of an hour or so and feed the baby newly caught worms. It was so fun to see the nearly-adult bird, clearly an uncertain flyer but skilled enough to go a few feet, old enough to clearly be a robin but young enough to still have the use of its own personal worm-delivery service. I'm mostly sure this is the same bird family, although I have seen a number of much smaller birds (of some other species) also hanging out on the front porch a lot, and I'd assumed that they were the nestling family. The eggs I so unkindly jostled out of their nest were blue, if that counts for anything.

We really loved seeing this little guy.

Peonies in bloom...

Our peonies finally did their thing this week, answering the ten-months' mystery of what color they would be. (White in the front yard, lovely pale pink in the back, which works with the pink/blue/purple floral scheme I'm slowly phasing in for the front yard.)

We've technically got three different plantings of peonies, but one of them put out only one bloom this year, a sure sign that it's unhappy, so I'll transplant the whole cluster of plants in the fall to the front yard, where hopefully the sun will make them happier. I know they take a few years to really get settled, but it seems like the best idea.

We've also got our hydrangias doing well, a ton of salvia (which had one of my students asking hopefully whether it was the, ahem, medicinal kind, to which I replied that sadly, I think it is not), and a whole yardful of purple coneflowers. I transplanted some of the latter today from various places in the backyard to the front, around the mailbox. The neighbor from the most yard-conscious family in our circle gave me a cheerful wave and a big thumbs-up when she saw me getting started with the mailbox garden, which I took for a good sign. It looks fairly wilted now, but I'm hoping that's just transplant shock. I dug the coneflower up from around the nice iris bed in the back, freeing up quite a bit of space and light for the iris, and then added in a couple of iris that had been mis-located next to especially expansive shrubs. So, to recap: peonies... mostly good! iris... mostly good! coneflower... everywhere, and pretty good!