Thursday, December 18, 2014

Outhouse Out Takes

Life is funny isn't it? One minute you're minding your own business (literally we own our own business and it takes a fair amount of minding) and the next minute the department of public health is threatening you with a $1000 fine.

Nope. It has nothing to do with raw milk, sales are going great and still no ridiculous rules passed,YEAH!, this piece of paper was related  to a gift we received last Christmas from our oldest son. Some of you might recall this awesome outhouse...



Built by hand- a real work of art; he even wrapped it in Christmas paper. A stunning gift and we were thrilled. Perfect for our new simpler life we are still striving towards. Then this past May all three of my strong sons and my hubby dug a nice deep hole for it. I was so proud. So proud that I, you guessed it, blogged about it. You can see that original post HERE. Silly me thinking Freedom of Speech was alive and well in the US.

What I did not know though, although I had suspected it; our government officials, rather than doing the self important work in their job descriptions, were spending a good amount of their paid-by-our-taxes-salaried time, reading my blog. Since they still have no basis to give us any trouble regarding raw milk sales, they instead went after a defenseless rectangular box.

Their claim? We didn't follow section 905.130  surrounding the building of a simple, single seater outhouse; excuse me, I mean "Private Sewage Disposal System." Attached to this letter was a five page permit application, requiring a $100 Permit Fee and three pages of "Administrative Code" regarding human waste disposal which had to be met. You might be thinking, big deal, pay the $100 and use your outhouse. Sadly, not so simple.

One of the requirements states that's the bottom of the privy hole must be at least four feet above the water level. One of the ISCA Certified Professional Soil Classifiers we contacted said that is virtually impossible to do in our county as our water level is very high and thus the only way we could meet the standards would be to purchase a septic tank, pay to have it properly installed and then place the outhouse over THAT!

Now here's where it gets funny. Wasn't that the whole reason for installing an outhouse? In order to avoid all that? So faced with the choices of spending thousands of dollars to continue "simplifying" our lives for the privilege of using our outhouse on our property say 3-4 times a month (since we still don't live there) or leaving it as is, paying the $1000 fine and probably many more fines to come, we decided to fill in the stupid hole because God knows how our little bit of "sewage" would certainly threaten an entire counties water supply. Never mind the tons of chemicals being dumped on the fields that surround this property on four sides, the massive amounts of runoff with each rain into the ditches and onto our non-contaminated farm, the drift of hazardous chemicals that float and drop down from above us by planes spraying additional herbicides and fungicides, because that you see...is legal.

So IDPH, here you go. Proof  that our outhouse is no longer a dangerous threat to our friends, neighbors and families of Livingston County, Illinois: a filled-in hole.

Previous outhouse hole to right of outhouse.

View through outhouse seat onto grass, no hole.


And no, we will not be inviting you on our property to "prove" the hole is filled in. Since you managed to cite us for non-compliance by merely reading my blog you can certainly un-cite us using your same in-depth investigative methods.

18 comments:

  1. F*@K you, IDPH. Seriously. You ALL need to get an honest paying job. I suppose the Illinois taxpayers are also paying for you to surf for porn on the web. I can only hope that there is a specail, horrible, sewage-filled hole of hell waiting especially for you.....and hope that wait isn't a long one.

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  2. No shit! It boggles the mind. It really does. Good thing you didn't put any of the despicable raw milk down the hole!

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    1. No, we used it as a time capsule. Memoirs, old cameo pins, love letters to inspectors...that kind of thing

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  3. The sickle moon on the door looks very nefarious, if not outright nearly communist. ;-)

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    1. Our son never does anything without a double entendre. He's all twisted that way.

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  4. Oh my word! Utterly ridiculous.

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    1. Yes, our hard earned tax money at work. We're so proud.

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  5. Sheesh. Sounds like these folks need real jobs. You know, ones where they rightfully earn a paycheck rather than play "gotcha" with innocent folks.

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    1. I get so frosted Leigh when I think about the time they spend so much time reading my blog! They never even comment. ...cowards all of them.

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  6. Tell them you are no longer going to use the Thunder Box, but will shit just behind it on the open ground. They should be happy with that.

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    1. And then we'll be arrested for indecent exposure. Well I will be. Keith still has very decent exposure.

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  7. Chuckling at the comments! I guess it is still the ditch for you both then ;)

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    1. You know Lorna my great grandfather had a saying, "Two sticks akin a ditch at least you can call it your own." I always thought he was talking about the importance of land...maybe not :)

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  8. Oh that makes me so mad!!! Can you just put a bucket of sawdust under the seat, and "dispose" of it as you please? Before our plumbing was hooked up, we just had a general area that we used. Because the cows go wherever they please, so no point trying to control it!

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  9. Also, I wish I got paid to read your blog at work! Best job ever!

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  10. wow. social media has its disadvantages, i guess!

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