Plumbing problems

Things kind of fell apart under our sink this evening. The garbage disposal jammed on a beer bottle cap (no finger pointing, please). I had a hard time getting it out because my fist wouldn't fit down the drain, but with a little assistance the cap was removed.

Problem still unsolved, and now water backs up and slows the right sink to a trickle. Since the dishwasher drain also feeds into the same disposal, this means I can't run the dishes until this thing is fixed. Maybe I should point out that I'm not much of a handyman.

To make matters worse, the pipe under the sink connecting right sink to the left/main drain comes loose, causing water from left sink to flow liberally into the closet. A bowl quickly gets jammed in next to the bucket.

Now comes the fun part: actually getting the dishes washed, by hand. It's back to the stone age, except that for now the faucet still works (knock on wood). I plug up the left drain and fill the sink with soapy water, while using the right side to rinse, periodically emptying a full bucket down the toilet. I'll be joining the circus tomorrow.

Two things came out of this unusual experiment.

First, the amount of water I used kind of surprised me, because I thought I was being careful. I went through almost 3 buckets of water, totaling at least 10 gallons. Is that more or less efficient than a dishwasher?

Second, it made me wish everything would just stop working. Yes it's a bit nuts, but I thought that if the power went out permanently, if the entire grid went down, that it would force us all into survival mode. We would get up off our fat asses and go back to the bare essentials, the basics of life. So what if we would have to dig a hole to use the bathroom, bathe in a stream (hopefully upstream from the hole), and make use of sunlight by day and fire by night.

Something as silly as broken plumbing made me yearn for a simpler life. Did I just say "yearn?"