Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Little Sherri]

16 hours ago, oznl said:

Typically what happens is that a void dissipates into dripping and stops, often re-starting again in a kind of post-script a short time later.

Sometimes, I'll notice later that the tap is somehow closed down there and it takes a wilful act to re-open it.  Other times (particularly when laying down for some reason), it will remain relaxed and there is a curious sense of "openness" from down there along with associated intermittent dripping and dribbling.

This is very much my experience a well. I have discovered that my "clench" has degenerated on the few occasions when I have tried to employ it - it's not something I get up to very often, but an example would be: I meet up with some friends for a quick pint, wearing a medium-duty diaper that I've already had on for a while, but this is just a quick nip in, everyone is driving home, this is not a campaign. Then, it's three or four IPA's later and someone's wife has said they will drive us all home, or we've resigned ourselves to Ubers. I don't want to go back to my car, get my diaper bag, come back to the pub, and then disappear into the washroom, and anyway, we're getting our bills shortly... I can hold it. 

Cashing out takes 20 minutes, the Uber takes 5 minutes to arrive, and now it's a 20 minute ride home, and I had already consciously stopped using my diaper maybe a half hour before that. That puts me on my front step 75 minutes since the last time I had a wee, and, I'm still processing IPA at a good pace. I put my key in the latch, and... Oh God! Peeing! Not sure my diaper can take this, I'm so close, just have to choke up for a minute... nope. I can't stop it once it's started. I've stood in my kitchen and felt drops traverse the inside of my leg while saying "I'm home - be right back - take the dog out? Sure. In a few minutes..." (runs up stairs). 

[oznl]

The whole “packing up house” alongside “getting other house de-tenanted and ready to be inhabited” has really sucked all oxygen from the room for this week.  Nevertheless, we are learning creatures.  This week I learned that in addition to alcohol, I can add another agent provocateur of my notoriously unpredictable bedwetting: physical exhaustion.

Tuesday, I spent the day out in a light truck with a helper moving heavy medical furniture from one spot to another (as I am prone to doing sometimes in my twilight-career).  I concluded this day by bringing home said truck from work in preparation for a long-haul trip early next morning that would have been more than 1.5 hours more time-efficient commenced from my house as opposed to the office.  As the work commitment was quite close to my “new” house (< 5km), I decided that I’d fill the truck’s considerable spare load space with odds-and-sods furniture from my current house that night to make the eventual task of fully moving easier.  Fate does not casually cast such providence before me and it seemed churlish to ignore it.

So, after a day dragging around heavy furniture, an evening of dragging around furniture.  The latter shift was notable for both more intimidating topography (steep driveway), darkness and the absence of any helper.  There was no helper on the evening shift however.

This work went late because I couldn’t start it until after I’d got home from my day work. Finished by 9pm, I was almost too tired to eat dinner and still in my day nappy: thanks to a combination of dehydration and effort, that day nappy had held up well.

Exhausted, I showered and changed before falling into bed dry.

Normally every night, I take up to an hour to fall asleep and wake up every couple of hours after that.  If I’m lucky, I fall back asleep quickly but frequently this luck is scarce.  Typically I will wake up one more time after 4:30am at which point I’ll just lay in bed waiting for the alarm.  I’m a terrible sleeper.

This night, going to bed for me was like falling off the edge of the world.  No dreams, no recollections of stirring, nothing.  The last time I slept like that it was because I’d been anesthetised.  It only ended when I woke in confusion because the room was filled with voices.  It was 6am.  The voices were from the clock radio.  I only realised my nappy was wet when I got up and felt the warm weight of it.

That was my 1,999th consecutive night in nappies.

Of course the next day I had a long-haul commute up the coast followed by the great truck unloading at my house (conducted quite early in the day to avoid hitting on my employer’s time) and then, start a day’s work before a long haul commute home.

Again, I fell unconscious into bed as though I’d been shot at around 10:15pm (I couldn’t wait for my customary 10:30pm bedtime as I was just too tired.   Although I had consumed beer (I felt I’d earned it), it wasn’t that much and I wouldn’t have described myself as under any significant influence of it.

Again, the world winked out around me.

Again, suddenly voices filled the room and it was 6am.  This time I could dimly remember waking briefly here and there but I clearly didn’t stay awake for very long.  I could not remember ever needing to pee and wondered if dehydration had denied my bladder anything to do all night.

Peeling off my terry-towel lined plastic pants in the bathroom however revealed a swollen, yellowish-fronted BeDry with an accusing blue line running down the centre of the crotch.

That was night 2000.

Twice in a row I wet the bed.  That’s rare.

Note to self: do not be tempted to skip night nappies at any point during the upcoming house-moving-proper festivities. 

There’ll have to be some embarrassing logistics to cover THAT base…

[oznl]

A slightly odd thing happened this week:  I woke up in the middle of the night in a mild state of panic because I thought I might not be in a nappy.

The room was dark and all was quiet (as you’d hope) at 2am when suddenly, I was awake with a start: something was wrong, or at least, something MIGHT be wrong.  Was I in my nappy?  Oh my god, I’d BETTER be. 

After 5.5 years of uninterrupted nappy usage, I thought it would have soaked into (did you see what I did with that?) ALL parts of my brain that this is how I roll these days but it seems that like that somewhere in the quarter-bucket of grey matter between my ears, there are some provincial villages that don’t always read the news. 

Lying in bed in the dark confusedly, I didn’t question the legitimacy of this frisson of panic but simply accepted its apparent importance at face value.  I groggily evaluated my condition to realise that my pyjama pants did seem suspiciously thick and my crotch bulky down there but this was a clue, not a finding.  

Gradually as I began to surface more into wakefulness, I remembered with a gentle, warm breeze of relief that I definitely HAD a nappy on.  I could recall changing one shortly before bed (just like I have down for more than 2000 of the preceding nights).  Whew!

Another layer of relief wafted down upon me as fluttering rose petals when I recalled that the nappy that was undoubtedly warmly embracing my midriff was one soundly-constructed of 2 layers of reasonably thick cloth pull-on beneath securely-fitted and enclosed-elastic plastic pants.  This was not some medical grade pull-up with the absorbency characteristics of a teabag.

Things were certainly looking up from where they were 7 sleep-befuddled seconds earlier.  The more I woke up, the less worried I was.   I further recalled that thanks to the twin miracles of physical exhaustion and dehydration, I had been dry when I went to bed so that nappy was not only of solid construction but had a full tank of capacity available to it.

So why the mental fire drill?

I slipped an exploratory finger under the waistband elastic of my plastic pants at my crotch and immediately felt wetness.  I was far from dry now.

I wasn’t peeing when I woke up but clearly I’d done so whilst asleep.  If you’d asked my waking brain, I’d have told you that I was dry but back in the provincial-brain-village-that-doesn’t-read-the-news, I knew that I had wet myself.   There had been no pee dream.   For whatever reason, at some, too-late-o’clock point after this event, my provincial-village brain had gotten the wobbles about the legitimacy of this “decision” and pressed an alarm button.  I’d woken to discover that I was dressed for success for such a venture and no intervention was necessary.

I fell back asleep but it was a slightly strange thing to happen.

It’s an interesting insight into the vaguely volitional nature of my self-inflicted secondary onset bedwetting.  It also seems that my bedwetting is back (again) but I know better than to go looking for it.

[oznl]

At the very same time @Little Sherri's other half has practically told him to wear cloth diapers for the sake of the household budget (if not the planet), my own beloved, again, lodged a complaint with me last Sunday about my use of cloth nappies:  specifically that they stink.

I’ve had this problem off and on before but thought I’d finally wrestled the gas-dragon with a combination of disabling the “eco” mode on the washing machine (it seems that the “eco” mode, on by default due to Government decree, makes unduly parsimonious and recycle-obsessed decisions with respect to the rinse water which is probably why it isn’t called “wash” mode), high wash temperature (only partially achievable in a nanny-state so rampant, hot water service temperatures are limited to 55C by law) and the judicious addition of anti-bacterial wash additive (at least this is not yet illegal here).

I confess I HAD noticed the odd slightly-less-than-subtle waft from under the covers this weekend but I’d hoped, somewhat forlornly, that it was only me that could tell.  Deodorant commercials in the 1960s had more truth in them than THAT theory.

The only other environmental variable that I can see has changed is that I switched laundry sanitiser.  For a long time, I was using the relatively-expensive “Canistan” brand but when our local supermarket had a bottle of “Pine-O-Clean” brand laundry sanitiser for literally half the price next to it on the shelf, I considered my paltry income, the imminent cessation of paltry income due to relocation and bought the Pine-O-Clean stuff.  What the heck.  I’ll take the Pepsi challenge…

It wasn’t until I got it home that I realised that you had to use double the dose of Pine-O-Clean relative to the Canisten so instantly, the alleged price advantage disappeared in a puff of hyperbole.

Oh well, so it’s the same price then.  But adding to the faint foul whiff of volumetric deception, there’s the wrinkle with the stuff insofar as it appears to not work.

Maybe it worked in the past.  Perhaps this is just another example of the inexorable force of en-shitification whereby everything gets cheapened and de-featured.  Maybe some laser-minded accountant decided that expensive active chemicals could be partially replaced by some lower cost alternative:  such as water.   I don’t know.  All I know is that the despite the 2x-generous slosh, my nappies are again starting to smell like a 2 week old wombat carcass that died from ammonia poisoning.

What the Pine-O-Clean stuff DOES have is a powerful scent of its own.  Perhaps the strategy here was to instead of sanitising away the odoriferous bacteria, simply wall paper over the top of them with some chemically simulated wet dream of what a Walt Disney pine tree might smell like in Technicolor.

In reality, this fake-but-powerful smell just lives alongside the similarly-powerful stale-pee smell that exudes from unsatisfactorily-sanitised wet cloth nappies.  I’m not entirely sure how pine trees got conflated with smelling “clean” anyway.  I can’t say that I’ve spent a lot of time sniffing pine trees as I live at more tropical latitudes but I’d expect that they’d smell of forest fire and bear shit.

Anyway, another problem to solve.  I need to solve this.  The upcoming loss of my income is going to make cloth nappies even more important to me.

[Little Sherri]

52 minutes ago, oznl said:

Anyway, another problem to solve.  

I did a little digging, and the active ingredient in Canisten is Didecyl Dimethyl Ammonium Chloride - colloquially referred to as "quat" or quaternary ammonia. Quaternary ammonia is available in its purest, most undiluted form, from institutional chemical companies, where it is sold as a concentrate, to be diluted and dispensed either into sinks, as a post-rinse sanitizing step for hand-washed dishes, or, into spray bottles or buckets, as a surface sanitizer. 

Any of the big chemical companies that sell dishwashing, housekeeping and laundry chemicals to restaurants, hotels, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, funeral homes etc, would have a preparation containing this stuff. You'd want one designed for food contact surfaces, ideally, so that it would not be enmeshed with chemicals that have floor cleaning capabilities, strong scents, or what have you.  

Given your current healthcare-adjacent employment, you might be able to get your hands on this stuff. It can be difficult, at the consumer level, to buy it directly from the companies that make it - they usually have minimums for accounts that require you to consume institutional quantities. But, at least in Canada, their are semiprofessional outlets and stores that vend professional-grade products to people who run small janitorial/cleaning businesses, small restaurants, hot dog carts, pet crematoria, etc - places either too small, or which suffer from chronically poor credit, and cannot qualify for direct accounts with the big players. Even with "stepped-on" pricing, you might be able to buy a 20 L bucket of concentrate for $150, that would contain as much active ingredient as 200 bottles of Canisten. 

[Bobbyca]

My experience with washing cloth diapers has slowly evolved over the years.  I rinse them after use (pee only) and store them in a five gallon pail for two or three days in water with a splash of vinegar.  I then spin them dry in the washing machine and check their smell after the spin cycle and if they're OK,  wash them in a regular cycle.  If they smell like a "barnyard" as someone put it, I throw them back in the bucket with hot water and a cup of household ammonia to ponder their sins for few hours. From there they  go straight into the regular washing cycle and they smell much better, with perhaps a touch of ammonia background which dissipates after drying.  I typically line dry after tumble drying for 20 minutes.

Something i recently discovered is the water remaining in a washing machine can get "funky" between washes, so now I run a cleaning cycle once a month of so with bleach or Affresh.  Bleach works just as well and it's much cheaper. 

[oznl]

On 10/19/2024 at 10:55 AM, Bobbyca said:

My experience with washing cloth diapers has slowly evolved over the years. 

I thought I had a pretty good "system" going there but the wheels fell off.  At this stage I am blaming en-shitification of the laundry sanitiser but we will see...

On 10/19/2024 at 10:55 AM, Bobbyca said:

Something i recently discovered is the water remaining in a washing machine can get "funky" between washes, so now I run a cleaning cycle once a month of so with bleach or Affresh. 

Oh yeah for sure!  We've figured out what that flashing LED on the machine panel means now (it begs for a cleaning cycle periodically) and we do it.

On 10/19/2024 at 10:55 AM, Bobbyca said:

 Bleach works just as well and it's much cheaper. 

Yep.  That *does* work and @Little Sherri did actually engineer me a dose based on our machine (worked out at about 1 cup per wash to "bomb" the garments).  I try to do that sparingly as I know how hard bleach is on cotton.

[Stroller]

I don't think we've had a problem with the washing machine getting smelly.  My other half hasn't raised it as an issue, since I started using sanitiser in the wash.  I can't really tell since Covid removed most of my sense of smell, so I have to rely on my wife for this.  I suspect it helps that normally I'm in washables full-time, so the washing machine is rarely left for longer than 2 days without being used for a 60 degree wash.  So any remaining water in there doesn't have time to fester.

[oznl]

Rotating my cloth products through a wash cycle that includes a pre-soak in nappy sanitiser along with an-even-greater-than-called-for dose of pine-tree flavoured laundry sanitiser seems to be bringing things back under control. 

Paradoxically, I’ve been wearing cloth nappies a lot lately.  It seems that mesmerised by the imminent prospect of 100% disposable use (I will be decommissioning our washing machine for the move later this week), I’ve decided to throw some positive karma at the environment and use my cloth products in high rotation.

When NOT peeing in cotton-under-plastic-pants, I’ve been mostly sorting, packing and building an ever-larger “take this to the dump” pile: that’s when I’m not actually on the road driving a car-load of removalist-unfriendly junk the 80 mile/128km between localities.

Earlier this week I did this wearing the “Omutsu Bulky Night Time Adult Cloth Diaper” featuring progressively-sodden sheep under white plastic pants.   I’m not sure about the “Night time” part of their branding: they lack critical padding at the sides but they certainly tick the “bulky” box.  Less-than-perfectly disguised by my short pants, I surveyed my curiously puffy-but-featureless crotch and unusually large bum in the mirror.  My visage was possibly not further improved by the fact that if I leaned over the right way, there would probably be a glimpse of plastic pant elastics to be had.

Oh well…

I wasn’t going to be appearing on television (hopefully).  I only had one other human that I’d have to interact with.  I was planning at stopping at “Littles Downunder” (my ABDL nappy dealer) which is on the way up to the new house to pick up a couple of cases to keep my clothes and furniture dry up until Christmas. 

In keeping with what my bladder does these days, I found myself slightly damp with 15 minutes of leaving home,

I’m guessing that the proprietor knows full well my underwear habits anyway since I’ve been going there in person for years.  In any case, he was polite enough to not make mention of it after I waddled in and we exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before exchanging cash for nappies.

Unfortunately, working up at my property, I found the increasingly-sodden Omutsu to be a little inconvenient.  I also found myself increasingly limiting my range of physical movement as I went up and down ladders as I began to realise how heavy and saturated it was becoming.  I might have even considered a tactical use of a toilet but it seemed that the only times I thought about that was when I became aware that I was wetting it further.

Predictably enough, I ended up driving home in damp shorts sitting on a towel: a certain quantity of tepid pee having been squished out my plastic pant leggings at my bum.  At least the shorts were black.  I suspect I smelled of pee to boot.  I doubt my beloved noticed at all however.  It was dark when I got home and she was engrossed in her fascinating reverse-tetris past time of trying to consume a maximal quantity of cardboard boxes for a minimal quantity of kitchen infrastructure.  12 hours in a Rearz Omutsu cloth diaper is too much to ask.  I suppose I could have used one of my cloth boosters (for an even bigger bum) but I didn’t.

I made a bee-line directly for the shower and changed into pull-on cloth nappies for dinner and bed, augmenting them for the evening shift by wearing a pull-on (and rip off) medical nappy underneath whose performance is so awful, it doesn’t even succeed as a booster pad.  It looked like no more than a pair of wet knickers when I took it off (and probably absorbed about the same.  My cloth pull-ons were wet anyway, such was the awesome incapabilities of the pull-up that was supposed to be defending it. 

As I tossed it into the bin I was consoled by that dead pull-up meaning I had one less thing to freight up the coast.

Expect temporary “loss of signal” as I traverse the dark side of the moon that is actually a long distance house move this week…

[Little Sherri]

13 hours ago, oznl said:

Expect temporary “loss of signal” as I traverse the dark side of the moon that is actually a long distance house move this week…

Godspeed, sir.

[Three Rivers]

Hope the rest of your move goes smoothly. Not a fun task to undertake.

[oznl]

This nappy-clad eagle has landed. 

Currently surrounded by rugged mountain ranges of unpacked boxes in our new large and unfamiliar waterside “McMansion”, we’re learning to live in our strange new location: the Australian Sunshine Coast.  Notionally, a glamourous, sun-drenched series of resort towns wedged between sub-tropical rain forests and white-sanded beaches starting at Caloundra and culminating in the terminally-fashionable “Noosa”, the lived reality is somewhat different from the postcards.  My particular area is demographically dominated by retiree couples.  Elderly women with peroxided hair and darkly-tanned skin wrinkled to raisin-like textures through sun exposure, sip their soy-Lattes besides small designer dogs in beachside cafes, apparently ignorant to the reality that the 70s is now their age bracket rather than the decade they live in.  Their menfolk park their S-Class Mercedes badly at the implausibly-expensive local golf club before donning white spats to while away the morning on gorgeously-manicured putting greens, discussing their preferred oncologists with their friends.

But not me.  I’m something else…

The move itself although tiring and difficult given advancing age and the decades we’d lived at our former digs, went fairly well.  As to be expected.  Living in nappies just made it 15% harder.   That’s what nappies do.

I managed a nappy rash half-way through: unsurprising.  Dragging boxes of books up and down staircases from dawn until dusk in escalating heat created both dehydration and friction.  My nappies were almost treacle coloured by change time and on more than one occasion, operational necessity meant that no change-time rinse could occur.  Out of a wet one, into a dry one, repeat without the lather and rinse.

Peeling off yet another BeDry that although only 35% wet, sported a dark tanned complexion, I surveyed with dismay fire-engine red skin at my crotch.  This was no fungal invader.  This was straight-forward, ammonia-powered contact dermatitis.  Upping the dose of rash cream at changes and taking the time to re-introduce changing time crotch rinses brought things back under control fairly smartly.

“Removal” day itself (the distance between our homes meant that our worldly goods would not arrive at our new home until the following day) was the much larger venture: undertaken from a multi-story house on a steeply sloped site.  I’d decided to undertake it in a “Mermaid Tale”, trading the lurid and somewhat-difficult-to-explain décor for their effortless “set and forget” modus operandi.  It was 14 hours and 120km away when I eventually peeled it off.  It wasn’t even that wet but it had held up effortlessly in the face of constant movement and use.  I saluted it on its way past to my new (temporary) nappy bin.

Constant fatigue and distraction during those few days taught me some interesting lessons.

“Alcohol Free” was relegated to the same category as “World Peace” and “Carbon Neutrality” for the week: an aspirational thought bubble that nobody took very seriously.  My capacity to drink alcohol however was severely limited by massive fatigue.  Typically, after 8pm and some kind of take-away (or, subject to microwave over accessibility, a reheated frozen meal), a beer or two followed by a glass of red would immediately result in me falling asleep in an available chair.

I wet my nappy whilst sleeping in a chair in the evening repeatedly.

The first time, I didn’t even realise until I stripped off my plastic pants to replace them with lined plastic pants for bed.  Much to my surprise, I saw that the wetness indicator had changed to a rather accusatory shade of blue.  I thought it might have been sweat but it seemed not.  I’d wet myself after dozing off in the chair although it hadn’t been much.

The next night I woke at 11pm, again in a chair, my beloved long since fled to bed.  I was in a “BeDry” which I felt immediately upon standing, was not that dry anymore.  Whilst far from needing a change, it was a more substantial effort than the previous nights.

On the first night that our furniture arrived at our new home, I did it again: plummeting into deep sleep in my recliner chair only to be woken by my beloved at midnight, enquiring if I might prefer to sleep in bed.  For some reason, when she woke me I was simultaneously shocked, confused as to where I was and embarrassed because I somehow thought I’d wet my pants and she was about to chastise me.  As my brain slowly sorted things out I realised that I had indeed wet myself but I was in a nappy so this embarrassing fact would remain private.  It seemed that when she roused me, on some level I already knew that I’d peed myself: such is the strangely volitional nature of my acquired bedwetting habit.

It was then, upon day #2 at our new abode that both my beloved and I simultaneously tumbled into the abyss of a deep, rich and bubbling head colds that bought with it fatigue and fever that effectively killed further unpacking, replacing it with a world of snot.

Now, I’m updating this instead of unpacking.  I should really stop and go open box #1433.

[CuriousForPadding]

Congratulations on the new place! I hope you get to spend at least a little “fun time” setting up your new diaper stash - personally, it’s like rearranging my bookshelf or sorting my record collection. Lots of fun getting everything “just so” and tidy.

Also glad to hear the good experiences with one of my personal faves, the Mermaid Tales. Such a treat to wear!

[oznl]

I’ve decided never to move house again.

I’ve spent the last fortnight living in disposable nappies: migrating from one seat in the house to another in order to survey a different pile of ineffably-packed boxes.  About 27% of each day is spent with me attempting to find some trivial-but-currently-needed item that is “in a box somewhere”.

The constant disposables diet is annoying me.  Firstly, they’re not “real” nappies in my mind.  I’m also dimly aware that I’m burning through those expensive Rearz cases very, very quickly.  Overall however, the whole nappy thing is getting very little attention right now.  There's just too much "move" stuff going on.  I’m often surprised to find myself wet, or wetting.  I’ve been too distracted to fixate much on my underwear it seems.

From a nappy perspective, the well-oiled machine that was my old house is all gone.  That is very clear to me now.  New storage locations and logistics strategies must be developed.

There are challenges: particularly potent for my penchant for cloth nappies.

Our current house effectively has no laundry: the “laundry” as such is in fact a designated zone in a corridor leading from the guest bedrooms to the garage.  Gone is my capacious-and-secluded laundry sink, capable of concealing two to three grown up size cloth nappies marinating.  Instead, a tiny designer-sink next to the washing machine alcove gleams, good only for soaking a pair of socks, or maybe drowning a guinea pig if that’s something you might feel inclined to do that is part of a well-trafficked thoroughfare.  I need to find a secluded and olfactory-isolated location to soak wet nappies.

I now find myself the proprietor of a clothes line that is both small and visible from the adjacent road.  I can’t see how plastic pants and sheep-decorated adult-sized cloth nappies are going to escape attention at some point.  The tumble dryer (an appliance I hate not only from an environmental but also a house-fire perspective) is entombed under disused garden appliances that we expensively relocated up from Brisbane so that’s not an option.  There’s nowhere to hang the thing anyway.  One glimmer of hope emanates from the apparent failure of the incumbent washing line: its location is near-useless (near-permanently shaded) and my beloved has asked me to consider engineering an alternative in a better spot so the “Honey I moved the clothesline” line may not provoke the kind of conversation it otherwise would.

My study is no longer my kingdom and domain.  Although I have a much larger study now, it must be shared with my beloved who (for now at least) is working from home.  A part of her work involves on-video appearances.  More than once I’ve wandered toward my desk only to find the study door shut.  It’s a strange and disempowering experience.

A shared study is a less than ideal scenario for nappy storage also.  Additionally, my nappy bin, reeking of vanilla beans and deceit courtesy of powerful chemicals (but far better than the alternative), is now lurking in our new walk in robe:  I’m waiting for the complaint. 

I’m not working right now, at least not any kind of paid work.  I’m trying not to think about this too deeply.  One of the less weighty implications of this however is that my nappy cadence no longer has to accommodate a change-free 12 hour period to cover work.

Accordingly, I’ve flipped my nappy cadence somewhat.  I’m currently using a lighter nappy during the day (actually burning through the never-ending “last case” of Abena L4) and using either a simple BeDry or my Rearz Inspire Mega+ as a kind of long-haul night nappy.  It goes on relatively early at around 6pm and stays on until 9 or 10am the next day.   On one notable occasion, I pulled nearly a 24 hour shift in one: a combination of tropical-heat-and-humidity style dehydration and business.

The Inspire Mega+ makes a super-comfortable night nappy and my terry-lined plastic pants haven’t seen any leakage action at all despite relatively frequent bedwetting (a function of fatigue and inattention I suspect).

My objectives for the next week include:

• Clearing floorspace to the extent where I can unleash our robot vacuum cleaner
• Find a path to at least intermittent cloth nappy usage
• Launder a growing pile of sweaty and slightly pee-infused plastic pants and compression pants that is lurking like a marriage-wrecking monster at the back of our walk-in-robe
• Avoid any nappy-related conflict with my beloved who is now never more than 20 meters away

[Stroller]

Keep your pecker up and soldier on!  We've been in the same house for over 25 years, and moving would be a nightmare.  One day we'll have to - this is an old house that needs a lot of maintenance, and it's bigger than we need now anyway, now the kids have left. Already there are things we can't do any more, often involving ladders or kneeling down (quite apart from the cow incident and an impending hip replacement). And my other half is a bit of a hoarder. Quite honestly the nappy side of things would be one of the easiest things to manage when we eventually have to up sticks.  I'm dreading it to be honest.  At least you've done the moving bit.  Good luck with getting it all sorted out over the next 10 years or so.

[oznl]

4 hours ago, Stroller said:

Keep your pecker up and soldier on!  We've been in the same house for over 25 years, and moving would be a nightmare. 

Technically, we'd only been in that place for fractionally over 18 years but I think we can satisfactorily tick the "nightmare" box.

4 hours ago, Stroller said:

 this is an old house that needs a lot of maintenance, and it's bigger than we need now anyway, now the kids have left. Already there are things we can't do any more, often involving ladders or kneeling down (quite apart from the cow incident and an impending hip replacement).

Yep that too...  The old house was 3 stories and 5 bedrooms, 4 of them empty.  Ladder use was obligatory, the brick paved driveway below considerably non-bouncy, and the ER states on ageing males and working at heights is well known.  We HAD to go.  A young family has bought it and it will get to host sulking teenagers and pool parties all over again which I find kind of cool.

4 hours ago, Stroller said:

And my other half is a bit of a hoarder.

I could not possibly comment on an open forum but let's say, ONE of us throws things out, the other "files" or "stores" them...  Who knows when you might need a copy of your phone bill from 2007?

4 hours ago, Stroller said:

At least you've done the moving bit.  Good luck with getting it all sorted out over the next 10 years or so.

Thanks!  I'd originally thought that in another decade or two (assuming I make it that far), I'd trade it out for an apartment overlooking the ocean.  That would be one more move but based on this moving experience, I think I'll just let some Government-appointed undertaker drag my nappy-clad arse out of the ruins at some (hopefully distant) point in the future 🤣

[soggster]

Still enjoying your updates - congrats on moving and I'm glad everyone survived!

 

You may find it helpful to have a lidded plastic box for your used nappies - I find the Really Useful Box brand really useful (funny, that) and they do some in opaque colours so you don't need to see a 360 marination progress. You could also pour in a cup of diluted scented disinfectant if you wished to nuke any smells. White vinegar also works a treat for any smells and is considerably cheaper (though the smell of the vinegar itself does go when dried).

 

As for drying, good luck! I've seen there's now heat pump driers which instead of using electricity to heat air that's immediately thrown out the window, instead uses it to just move heat from the outside to the inside of the drier which in turn absorbs moisture away from clothes. It may be more efficient but they do cost more up front.

 

You highlight a good point though - we all manage our lifestyles and get to a point where we have everything down to a tee, but it doesn't take much for our routines to fall into disarray and leave us having to find new ways to cope. It's when we have a change of routine that nappies can become a real pain to manage!

[Little Sherri]

On 11/14/2024 at 12:51 AM, oznl said:

My study is no longer my kingdom and domain.  Although I have a much larger study now, it must be shared with my beloved who (for now at least) is working from home.  A part of her work involves on-video appearances.  More than once I’ve wandered toward my desk only to find the study door shut.  It’s a strange and disempowering experience.

Have you considered a murphy bed or a fold-out couch for the guest bedroom, thus allowing it to have dual uses? In our previous house, my wife & kids had a "bonus room" for their desks, crafting and hoarding activities, and I usurped the guest bedroom, since it was really only in use, at most, a few weeks a year or less. I can't share an office with my wife - it just doesn't work. I tried, for the first few weeks we lived in this house, before I set up my office in a separate space. Sharing an office with her would lead to divorce faster that even putting myself back in nappies would...

There are clever compact desk solutions and/or cabinetry and countertops that you could employ to create a workspace that would be unobtrusive, should someone need to call the room home for a few days here and there. 

For the laundry sink solution... a gardening shed? You live in a land where plumbing doesn't have to be below the frost line... you could erect a shed in the backyard, with a laundry sink in it, fed by a hose in a shallow trench, and put a French drain under it - a gravel-filled cavity that you cover over, and that grey water/rinse water can drain into. Nappy rinsing and storing occur in the shed, and then they get schlepped into the house for washing. As a bonus, that shed would probably get pretty hot  under the rafters... maybe you could hang-dry the nappies there, out of sight? 

I realize proposing a dedicated "nappy shed" might require some marketing polish... 

[oznl]

12 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I can't share an office with my wife - it just doesn't work. I tried, for the first few weeks we lived in this house, before I set up my office in a separate space. Sharing an office with her would lead to divorce faster that even putting myself back in nappies would...

We may yet get there...  I'm not enjoying the experience.   At all.

12 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

There are clever compact desk solutions and/or cabinetry and countertops that you could employ to create a workspace that would be unobtrusive, should someone need to call the room home for a few days here and there.

You haven't seen my "wall of monitors".  You can never have too many pixels in my book 🤣  Then there's my books and radio junk.

12 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

For the laundry sink solution... a gardening shed? You live in a land where plumbing doesn't have to be below the frost line... you could erect a shed in the backyard, with a laundry sink in it, fed by a hose in a shallow trench, and put a French drain under it - a gravel-filled cavity that you cover over, and that grey water/rinse water can drain into. Nappy rinsing and storing occur in the shed, and then they get schlepped into the house for washing. As a bonus, that shed would probably get pretty hot  under the rafters... maybe you could hang-dry the nappies there, out of sight? 

I realize proposing a dedicated "nappy shed" might require some marketing polish... 

I had to google "French Drain" but once I'd done so, absolutely not I'm afraid.  I'm directly on a watercourse and also, we have to manage termite risk (a huge issue at our latitude) and perma-damp soil is a huge no-no.

I DO have a gardening shed but it's tiny, it's crammed full of move rubbish and therefore inaccessible, except for the Diamond Python that has taken up residence in there, somewhere...

I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

[Little Sherri]

19 hours ago, oznl said:

except for the Diamond Python that has taken up residence in there, somewhere...

I almost wish we had these; probably great for pest control. Riddle me this: at this time of year, death stalks anything that lives outside - water is poised to become naturally a solid at ambient temperatures. The reptiles we have, an unambitious lot, all burrow down as far as they can and try to sleep for half the year, and many of the mammals do the same. Mice migrate indoors where they can, so I find myself setting traps for them in the basement. Well, one got trapped - I viewed the tableaux of its undoing on my way to refresh my nappy drawer. I went back later to deal with that, because I'm travelling a lot right now (I'm in a hotel room right now...), and when I went back, it was gone. The mouse. Also, the trap. I asked my wife if she'd done something with it, and she said "That's a blue job." My daughter hasn't been in the basement in a year, so I know it wasn't her. So, what, exactly, claimed the corpse of a mouse, and, the trap it was in? I wish I had a python. 

[oznl]

1 hour ago, Little Sherri said:

 I wish I had a python. 

I'll get my beloved to post you one.  She wishes that ALL pythons were in Canada.

Our local ones can achieve intimidating scale.  I've seen some that have been 4 meters and thicker than my arm.  They are disinterested in humans (we are neither threat nor food) but occasionally pick off their pets.

At my old house I can recall copping a spray from a neighbour over the back because a large python had progressively eaten her kid's collection of guinea pigs.  She felt that I was encouraging the pythons by having trees on my land.  I felt she was encouraging human stupidity by breeding.  Guinea pigs are like Oreo cookies for pythons: they just can't stop at one and will eat a whole pack before sleeping for a fortnight.

[oznl]

Nearly three weeks in to residing at our new abode, this week I was at last again able to greet the dawn clad in the decadent luxury of warm, wet towelling, pins and plastic pants.  It was nice not to be peeing in paper and polythene even if a Rearz Inspire+ Mega can get close to a cloth experience.  It’s also nice being able to “let go” in bed in forbidden positions such as on my side or even quel horreur, laying on my belly but remain secure in the knowledge that my cloth nappy will deal with it and I won’t be surreptitiously attempting to dry a wet spot in the bed with the ceiling fan on high the next day.

It’s a shame that my beloved does not share in my simple joy.  She dislikes my cloth nappies even more intensely than the disposable variety.  Although not a viable marital conversation topic, I’m aware that she can sometimes smell my wet cloth nappies in the morning and I also suspect she dislikes how visually obvious they can be along with their residual laundering footprint (even though all such laundry is undertaken exclusively by me).  As I waddled from our bathroom at my evening change, resplendent again in an admittedly-bulky pinned terry nappy under my short pants her gaze laser-focused to my crotch and hardened.  I imagined I heard an almost-inaudible sigh but nothing actionable was said.

She couldn’t leave things at “almost-inaudible” for long though.  A few minutes later as I hauled myself out of an armchair to refill my (non-alcoholic, because I’ve gone back to trying not to drink most week-days) glass, she felt moved to critique my sartorial choices:

“Look at you!  Your ‘pants’ are so tight you can hardly move!”

She can’t bring herself to use the word “nappy”.  Even her substitute label “pants” was demarcated in invisible quotation marks in her speech, like holding a repellent object using a pair of grammatical tongs to avoid touching it.

It’s true that those largest nappies, pinned tightly do inhibit movement a little.  I’d hesitate to try flamenco dancing in them.  Nevertheless, they are NIGHT nappies: destined to lurk beneath the cover of darkness and nocturnal privacy and I almost never indulge in flamenco dancing in bed.  Furthermore, a fair degree of my physical movement restrictions were a consequence of spending the entire day laying on the kitchen floor in various positions before dismantled kitchen cabinetry with power tools.  This was in order to introduce the water chiller and icemaker in our refrigerator to a filtered potable water source nearly 10 meters of bench space away in our new house: a task that my beloved was especially keen for me to undertake.  By November here, even cold tap water is approaching 30C at times and includes plenty of chlorination.

I told her why I was stiff and sore.  Morally snookered, she fell silent, choosing to bask in her annoyance solitarily.

The logistics of grown-up-sized cloth nappy use remain challenging at this new house.  I can only cache two, or at a pinch three nappies in a cupboard in a small, uncovered bucket so I need to run the washing machine more often than I’d like.  I’m then left with the next challenge of drying said nappies as the weather has turned unseasonably monsoonal (frequent heavy rainfall and high humidity) whilst the tumble dryer from our old house remains buried-and-inaccessible up the back of our garage somewhere with nowhere to hang it and considerable question marks with regard to if it still even works (it was near death when we pulled it off the wall).

Employing the “WWJD?” model for guidance, I decided that I might as well be crucified for a sheep as a lamb and so remained in cloth nappies for a full three days and nights.

My last cloth nappy night featured a rather pleasant (and rare these days) “pee dream”.

Like a few of these, this one played at the borders between “real” and “dream”.  In my dream I had, paradoxically, woken up.  I know I wasn’t really awake because too many environmental facts of my “awake” state were clearly untrue.  It would be too strong to say that I needed to pee because these days, things never get that far before some kind of wetting event.

I became aware that my entire pelvic floor was in its relaxed “dropped” state.  It felt curiously light and I knew it was highly likely that I’d very soon leak some urine out unless I took some steps to clench things up: something that’s a bit hard to remember how to do these days.

In my dream I wasn’t in a nappy although I was in bed.  Instead, I was wearing some kind of fairly heavy pyjamas.  I also decided that it wasn’t worth doing anything about my relaxed pelvic floor and that it would be somehow “ok” for me to just wet the bed and I ‘d deal with it in the morning.  I was far too comfortable and sleepy where I was laying.

We make such great choices when we are asleep.

Thusly liberated from staging any kind of intervention, I just remained still (on my right hand side as it happened) and accepted at some point, I would be in a wet bed and it didn’t matter.  I didn’t try to pee, I just didn’t bother to try to stay dry either.  My beloved sleeping beside me had not featured in this dream.  I was alone in my dream bed.

Sure enough, some indeterminate amount of time later, I felt some ineffable quantity of pee start to seep slowly out into my pants.  Upon reflection the next morning, this episode although vivid, did not feel like wetting the bed at all.  I know from experience that when you urinate in bed outside of a nappy, everything around you gets VERY wet very quickly:  much more so than when confined in a nappy.  And then it gets cold.  Very quickly. This wetting was a localised, insulated wet heat at my crotch slowly spreading downhill towards my right hip.  It felt like I was wetting a nappy.  It was just that in my dream I thought I was wetting my bed.

Wet bed or not in my dream it was all fine.  Nothing to worry about.  I can’t remember ever “finishing” my pee. I think I just fell out of dream back into sleep before I noticed any kind of finishing.  Sleep is where I stayed until I woke up the next morning and remembered everything.

Now I have a pile of wet adult terry nappies and it’s 24C, pouring rain and 85% humidity.

[Little Sherri]

Question, @oznl - do Australian domiciles tend to have basements? I've faced the problem you were solving a few times (except the water was never 30 C), and usually, I've solved it by running the water line down through the floor, through some joists in the basement ceiling, and the back up through the floor. 

I have a good friend who lives in Florida, and they basically never have basements - the water table is about 24 inches below the ground, so a basement needs to be about as watertight as a boat. Whereas up here, almost everything has a basement, because you tend to want the foundation to be footed below the frost line. Although commercial structures are for the most part built on slabs, but houses nearly always have basements. 

[oznl]

3 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

Question, @oznl - do Australian domiciles tend to have basements?

Generally not.  The "basement" does seem to be far more common in North America.  I can't think of ANY friends or family that have anything resembling a basement.

4 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

I have a good friend who lives in Florida, and they basically never have basements - the water table is about 24 inches below the ground, so a basement needs to be about as watertight as a boat.

Bingo!  I now live on the waterfront where the water table is never more than a few shovel loads south of the turf.  In any case, my house is steel-frame-on-concrete-slab construction which is common enough in Australia nowadays.

[ozziebee]

The only kinds of "basements" I know of are residential towers with carpark basements.

My house too (near Sydney, about 800km south of Oznl's location) is steel frame on concrete slab, which means we either need to get the plumbing in before the slab is poured, have it pre-run within the frame walls, or have it run much like Oznl completed, from cupboard to cupboard.