Squeegees in the storm

Would be a decent to excellent novel title, but I'm stuck after that.

Perhaps you can tell I have some free time these days?



Okay, I know I've ranted about this before but it continues to baffle me. Israelies are excellent at architecture, they're technological masterminds, they can irrigate anything into vibrant fertility (I trust that my husband could make the kitchen floor sprout tomatoes with a Nalgene full of water if the need arose). So I cannot cannot cannot wrap my head around the bathroom design here.

Essentially they take a room, put a hole in the floor, and then stick a shower head, a toilet, and a sink in said room. Perhaps an ornamental shower curtain separates the elements. Perhaps there's even a symbolic ridge on the floor loosely denoting the shower area. But the water in no way is funneled towards the drain and in no way is the shower head one of those yummy rain ones that pours straight down. No, it's generally one of those detachable shower hoses with a penchant for wildly ricocheting from wall to wall when you turn the faucet on. Which really doesn't make a difference since the bathroom is continuously soaked any way.

Now you have to admit it's thrifty, and I do take some pleasure in peeing, brushing my teeth, cleaning the bathroom, and showering simultaneously.

But here's what I hate. After the shower, you're expected, while cold and wet and freshly scrubbed, to grab a giant squeegie on a stick, and futilely attempt to shovel all the water into the drain. I tolerated this in my old apartments, but my new apartment takes things a step further.

So the floor here actually slopes down away from the drain, out of the bathroom, and bottoms out somewhere in front of the living room couch. And the water pours down this slope much faster than the meager little drain can collect it. The end result is that for literally the entire duration of my shower I have to continuously squeegee the water back towards me as I attempt to shampoo, shave, and soap one-handed, or I flood the entire apartment.

This ruins showering for me to such an extent that I chose option B. Flood the Entire Apartment for the first week and a half, until my husband gently informed me that this is not good roommate behavior.