We had friends over for dinner last Sunday. The feast was a one-day-late celebration of Russian Christmas, and featured vegan borscht, eggplant “caviar,” and seedless black bread. The dinner was a success, to say the least.

Part of the prep for this invovles peeling vegetables. And usually, you can get away with feeding the peelings into the garbage disposal in the sink, let it grind stuff up, things drain, no problem.

However, as sprite notes, things didn’t go as planned with the sink. It clogged – and solidly. Even some drain clearing gel wouldn’t move the clog, which was somewhere in the pipes after the garbage disposal.

It rendered the kitchen sink fairly useless. We could wash dishes in small batches, and the waste water would slowly drain over a period of several hours. sprite chose to wait it out, figuring that the organic matter would liquify and pass – after all, vegetable matter in the garbage can quickly liquifies, so why won’t the same stuff in the drainpipe?

Last night, the sink began to have a peculiar odor. It wasn’t pleasant, to say the least. So I did what I should’ve done at the beginning:

I went to the bathroom and grabbed the plunger.

After four or five rounds of heavy-duty suction, the water drained. And drained. And drained.

Gotta love the utility of basic tools!