Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I recently read The Ghost Map, which tells the story of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Central to the story is the fact that, according to medical thinking at the time, disease was spread by bad odors from sewage. And as a result, great efforts were made to build a sewer system to pipe all the sewage into the Thames. Sadly, the Thames was the main source of drinking water for London, so you can pretty much guess how well that worked out. But due to the efforts of Dr John Snow, it was established that cholera was transmitted by contaminated water.

So we know now that bad odors don’t spread disease. But that doesn’t change the fact that they do, in fact, stink.

My neighbor’s house caught fire back in June, and they are currently in the process of fixing it up. So the construction company has set up to do a complete rebuild of the interior of the house. They’ve been working on it for about two or three weeks so far. The construction guys said that it was probably going to be several months before they’re finished.

At first, I was a bit concerned when I saw that they’d put their portajohn on the driveway about five feet from my bedroom window. But it wasn’t a problem.

At first.

Now that it’s been a few weeks, and it’s been hot, it’s becoming a problem. It cools off nicely here at night, so I generally put a window fan up to bring in the cool air. And it brought in more than cool air last night.

I called the company today, and they said that they’d make arrangements to move it and call me back. You can pretty much guess the rest. I came home, and it’s still there. And it’s Friday afternoon. Fortunately, it’s not all that heavy. So I was able to just scoot it about 10-15 feet away from my house and onto the neighbor’s front lawn. This should take care of the problem for now.