Hi katlan,

I find your vision of the Great Beyond quite interesting.

So - though I didn't have to learn how to cope with a pressure-water equipped bathroom (at home) until I went to university, and we lacked a detached outhouse through almost all of my child-/ young adult- hood, ... ... I'm inclined to consider your view of the place somewhat ancient, or outdated - for most North Americans, Europeans and a few others ...

... and am wondering whether management is having a hard time rounding up the necessary cash to update their infrastructure?

Had you heard whether they offer heated seats?

Bidet?

Oh, right - we're (disembodied?) spirits, then?

ole joyfuelled

joyfulguy:

It may come as a shock, but as a boy (in the 1940s), all we had was a stinking outhouse on rural farms in southern Illinois. Farm houses did not have a bathroom because there was no electricity and no running water. Copper was restricted during WW2. After the war, electricity came to farms in 1947, but those houses had been built many years before, thus the arrival of electricity did not automatically put a bathroom in the house. This was the main difference between city homes and country homes. (Outhouses were loathed in winter.)

Outhouses were slow to disappear. A few remained through 1960. One-room country grade schools had outhouses, and most of those schools were gone by 1960.

We still have our outhouse and use it on occasion...always liked that the door opened in...no matter how deep the snow, you could always get in in a hurry!

I was 10 when World War II started in 1939, we had electricity, which we've always called "hydro" (Hydro Electric Power Commission) in Ontario, as the original supply was provided by water from Niagara, and we got our first radio about 1940.

Dad had a larger farm than most of the neighbours, and soon the hired hand went to war, so what Dad and I and a couple of younger brothers got done for the next few years - got done, and the rest didn't, so I think I had early lessons in prioritizing.

Dad felt that the well in the yard needed cleaning, but the walls were so precarious that he was afraid to go down into it. He had a well drilled by the house in 1936, during the great depression and lines put to three barns. Mom was in psych. hosp. from when I was 6, shortly after birth of third son. Had she been home, we might have had a bathroom not long after.

We had a large brick house, 36' by 40' - 6 bedrooms on second floor, three with closets - and a narrower brick summer kitchen and woodshed on the back, with a lean-to on the back side (if you'll pardon the expression) (i.e. the side farthest from the side road), that included a two-holer at the far end that we used in summer. In winter we had a single commode in (an otherwise unused) bedroom upstairs, vented into one of four chimneys. There was a large black walnut clothes cupboard in that room that held a number of mom's dresses.

The kitchen range had a water reservoir on the far side of the oven, and we used a round washtub at one end of the stove for bathing. Woe betide the lad who didn't add water to the reservoir, so that the next child had heated water for his turn (actually, his water wasn't thrown out - just added more warm). Fortunately, no sisters, requiring complicated scheduling. Grandma had a large ceramic jug sitting in a large ceramic basin in her room for sponge bathing.

When we moved to Saskatchewan just after World War II, dad sharecropped for a while and we had no electricity, so had a battery radio, and a two-holer in the back yard. If I remember correctly, there was a commode behind a partition in the basement for use in winter: we didn't have to go the teeth-chattering route. I was there for only a couple of years, then to University, and after about four years Dad bought his own farm, which had power and a bathroom: taken over later by youngest brother, now retired.

Dad had 40 years of good health in Saskatchewan's drier air.

ole joyfuelled