Compartment 14B

BlogHer �07: 800 women united by a hatred of automatic toilets. 2007-07-31 - 10:15 p.m. Okay, the above wasn�t the official title for the BlogHer Conference, but I did find that a surprising number of women share my loathing for those infernal devices. Every time I see one of those evil little red lights in place of a toilet handle my heart sinks. I gingerly perch, waiting, oh just waiting for the damn thing to go off prematurely. I am seldom disappointed. Sure enough, I lean a little bit forward to reach for the toilet paper just beyond the grasp of my T-Rex arms and I hear the ominous gurgle beneath me. I have two choices and a split-second decision: if I�m done my business I can vault up and out of range, risking only a few stray drops of pee falling onto my pants as I frantically grab some paper and swipe, or, if I�m even less lucky and have been caught �in the act� I can grit my teeth and hope that this toilet, unlike the vast majority of similarly-armed devices, is not a splasher. This faint hope is generally dashed when I find my behind at the business end of a fountain of cold drops. The hair-trigger toilets at the conference facility offered me the chance to test these delightful choices many times, once three times in one pee session. And dude, even if I can pee a lot at once, it�s not like it takes hours, y�know what I�m saying? I have to ask: is it really worth making sure people don�t have to sully their hands to flush if you waste water at that rate? And it didn�t seem like I was the only one that would forego the autoflush and just wash my hands at the sink already, rather than think about what might be in the water spraying my butt when the damn autoflush misfired yet again. It seemed like every time I was in the bathroom there was a symphony of flushing-and-yelping. Bathroom hi-jinks aside, there was plenty to like about BlogHer. More to come as time permits. In the meantime� No, I don�t know yet if I�m pregnant. My unpredictable skin and vague, ongoing queasiness that started over the weekend says maybe, but the test this morning surprised me by saying no. I�ll try another test in a couple of days. I know it�s early still (10 days post-ovulation), but if I am pregnant a First Response test had a 65% chance of catching it at this point. Fingers crossed. Before - After All content � Shawna 2003-2010 That means no swiping my stuff - text, images, etc. - without asking. P.S. If you're emailing me, replace the [at] with @ in the "to" line. Oh, and if you put the word "journal" in the subject line it'll have a better chance of making it past my junk mail filters. recommend me HTML and design help by Jo hosted by Diaryland