Latest / Privycast / Ep. 30 How Summer Heat Affects Our Sewage

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Ep. 30 How Summer Heat Affects Our Sewage · Privycast

0:00
It can cause sewage problems.
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Red alert, baby.
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The water level is rising and with it, the sewage is coming up.
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Privy is a podcast about bathrooms and toilets recorded here from my home toilet.
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I am Hunter Hoover, your toilet enthusiast, bathroom user.
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I'm so glad you're here this week.
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I hope you enjoy this episode.
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As we continue to delve and dive further into our Privy summer,
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Before we get to regular programming though, um I wanted to share that I, ah up here at the top of the episode, a little plug, I wanted to share that I have the privilege of
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getting to be on Pickled Parables.
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um Pickled Parables is a podcast about the Bible and how it impacts our lives.
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ah I would love and encourage y'all to go check out Pickled Parables.
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wherever you get your podcasts and uh yeah, check out parable ministries on your social media.
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But yeah, huge recommendation and here not before long.
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If you go start listening now, ah he's got a great, Jesse is the host of the show.
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He's got a great series going on right now on the book of Galatians.
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And so you'll hear me there soon, not talking about bathrooms.
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So.
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Yeah, go check out Pickled Parables and uh yeah, support Jesse, he's a good guy.
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But this is privy, where potty talk is not only found, but is encouraged and maybe sometimes a little too much.
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I wanna hear quick, do a gym bathroom check-in.
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So I shared on the last episode about Nathan's famous hot dog eating contest uh that.
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We're gonna do this bathroom check-in, the gym where I do my exercising and more frequently than I'd like to admit, but do my pooping.
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I think there's something related to the anxiety of working out and then needing to void your system moments before you go sweat a bunch.
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Yeah, before or after a big sweat usually seems to...
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really get the brown snake flowing.
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So, but a quick update.
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They sort of cleaned this gym toilet and the next time I think about it, it's always weird.
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Like I've thought about it a couple times about like getting a picture of this toilet, but it's always weird.
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Like I always feel weird when people have their phones out because it's technically a locker room.
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And though it's not like a high school or anything like that, like when you're in high school,
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They're like, yeah, don't do that.
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you know, there's no sign saying don't do it, but I think it's just kind of like an unspoken, unwritten rule that you don't like use your phone camera.
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But we'll see what we can get stirred up here.
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See if we can get a photo of this uh culprit toilet.
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But as I said, they sort of cleaned it.
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And by sort of cleaned it, I mean, they, the biggest, the biggest,
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piece of fecal matter was removed, but there's still like residual sploosh fecal matter, which makes me think that this was not an employee clean job, but rather some bathroom
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user noticed the biggest chunk and opted to wipe that out themselves.
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So good on you if that is what happened.
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Yeah, but we're going to continue this gym bathroom check-in.
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It does not get the cleaned seal of approval as of the date of recording, July 23rd.
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Other bathroom stuff, as I've shared, I'm a janitor uh at a facility in Salem.
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And this week, you know, somebody had the very good idea of scraping their dinner plate off into what looked like...
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So the...
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Man, it...
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The trash can in the bathroom is directly adjacent to the pooper in the bathroom.
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And so what happened was, is somebody scraped what looked like either barbecued meat or baked beans or a combination of the two, either off into the trash and missed and it hit
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the side of the toilet.
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And I don't know if you've ever seen what baked beans look like when they hit the side of white porcelain, but it
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does look remotely like poop, so there is that.
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ah But somebody did...
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They missed the trash or they were aiming for the toilet with the baked beans and stuff, in which case, don't do that.
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That's...
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You have to eat and swallow and...
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produce it before it goes in there.
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Silly.
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So that was fun to...
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It wasn't even hard to clean up.
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That's the thing.
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Like it's not even a complaint.
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It's just another thing I got to walk in on yesterday.
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So that was fun.
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And you know, at that same job where I do janitorial, know, a few summers back, the septic system was having problems.
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More on that in a little bit.
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But as we transition into this week's topic, ah privy summer, one of the things that happens in summer is it gets hot.
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Man, it's just been like a constant trickle of over 80, like 80 to 90 for like the last two weeks.
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I do not function well after 80 degrees.
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Like, no.
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It's too hot.
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I do not like it.
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I do not like it, Sam, I am.
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I do not like hot outside...
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I don't know how to rhyme it.
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And as I've complained multiple times, man, it's been hotter than Satan's leg pits this summer.
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It's just hot and there's no rain.
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Yeah.
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But I personally, as a, what I would call a full-bodied adult person, don't always enjoy, let alone do well with the heat.
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We went to the county fair last week and it was hot.
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You just stand there and you sweat and everything's like on asphalt.
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And so it's just like, that's not good.
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And there's a lot of people there.
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And I think I'm just, I think I'm just getting too old for the fair.
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Like I told my wife, so we went to the county fair.
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I went to the county fair a Thursday and a Friday, but then that Saturday was Pokemon Go Fest 2021.
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Had a blast, had a wonderful time playing Pokemon Go.
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But I told my wife, I was like, I would rather do this, play Pokemon Go extensively for multiple hours every weekend for the rest of my life than ever go to the county fair ever
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again.
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And I'm serious.
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I think I'm just getting too old and you know,
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People wear some wild stuff at the fair.
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think there's some psychology about when the fair is in town and what people wear that you could directly trace.
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All I'm gonna say is, if I attempted to wear much of the clothing that I saw on display, I would probably have the cops called on me as a, again, full-bodied adult.
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Also, it's hot and the AC at one of my jobs has been working overtime.
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I just got back, the time of recording this, got back actual minutes ago from our young adults group meeting uh and the air conditioning was working.
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It was so sweet.
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It was so nice to just hang out with the peeps and have good discussion and have air conditioning.
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We recharged the air conditioning, but it looks like a replacement.
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uh
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uh At our church is just on the horizon.
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So um, yeah It's just hot The heat is rough.
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It's rough on us
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It's rough on our cars and buildings and electronics.
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My phone is getting into the dinosaur stages of its life.
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And when it gets a little warm, man, she lags.
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Like she just slows down and it just doesn't function properly.
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And it's tough on the folks who are fighting fires, keeping folks safe.
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As I said, it's dry.
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You know, thank you for those who are both paid and volunteer firefighters who are helping maintain and manage the fires that have already started and hoping to curb the ones that
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may.
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We're praying for some rain.
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I hope you all stay safe.
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Thank you for what you do.
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And when we think of summer heat, there's one thing that we
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don't think would take a hit, but does.
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And that is sewage systems.
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This week on Privycast, we're talking about summer sewage.
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And if you heard that and you backed up and you went, did he say summer sewage or summer sausage?
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I didn't say summer sausage.
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Summer sausage is good, but summer sewage, the summer heat affects our sewer systems.
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just as much as it affects or more than it affects our daily lives.
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In short, plumbing undergoes a number of strains in the summer that we need to be aware of because when the summer hot dang, summer up on my city, the back of my neck is getting
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real hot and gritty.
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summer sewage having a blast hope it doesn't explode in my lawn summer sewage
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Plumbing undergoes a number of strains in the summer that we need to be aware of.
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First, as the temperatures rise, and especially as the ground warms, a couple of things happen.
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First, the dirt, as it gets drier and drier with the heat of the sun, the dirt actually becomes looser.
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It gets looser and then it settles and can cause the pipes to settle in turn.
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This can result in cracking
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especially in older pipes.
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uh Yeah, it can result in strains in underground pipe.
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And number two, another factor of the heat is as the ground increases in temperature, the pipes under the ground, now get this, also increase in temperature and this can cause them
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to expand and crack.
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But outside of ah
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The sun beating down and the heat causing further concerns for your sewage in the summertime.
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It's privy summer.
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It's a good thing, but it's hot, which could be bad.
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Another summer concern for the plumbing world is the amount of water people are using in the extreme heat drastically increases.
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This means a couple of things.
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Not only are the pipes undergoing stress from the heat and the earth settling, but
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There is more water usage and water runoff happening through those pipes.
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You're trying to keep the plants alive, all the green friends that you have, you're trying to keep them from dying.
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Or if you're me, you just say, I'm sorry, but you're gonna have to wait till it rains.
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No, you're trying to keep the lawns alive.
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The kids have gotta get their sprinkler and water balloon fixed.
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There's an increase in water usage in the summer.
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And I think people are washing their cars more often.
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Pro tip, if you are able to pull your car onto your grass to wash your car, you water your lawn and wash your car for the price of one.
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Pro tip there.
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But there is more water usage.
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And more use means an increase in the likelihood of a sewer system failure.
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Along with scorching temperatures that make you feel like somehow you can't
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get away from being too close to a campfire.
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Like you always just feel like the campfire is around you.
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You know that feeling when you're sitting around the campfire and it's just too hot and you don't really feel like you can get farther away from it to get away from the too hot?
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So yeah, that's what summer's like.
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But these extreme heats and these drastic changes in temperature can also bring around, woof, around summer rain showers.
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Summer rain showers, personally, are some of the most refreshing things we experience on this earth.
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When it's hot and just dry and then all of a sudden the sky, just becomes a sprinkler, that smell of fresh summer rain, dude, like.
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That's it man.
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That's the smell.
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But summer rain showers can dump like woofy and when they do, it can cause sewage problems.
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Red alert baby.
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The water level is rising and with it, the sewage is coming up.
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When the rain comes down too fast, the water does not have enough time to run off and move down the poop chute into the great turd beyond.
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And when this happens and
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When it happens too quickly, that water comes from the sky faucet.
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Septic in sewers can back up, clogs can form, and when human brown production is involved, backups and clogs are the last thing anybody wants.
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When you introduce feces for those of us who poop, you don't want backups and clogs.
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Bad news, in the worst case, the sewage could even back up into your home.
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No, absolutely not.
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That's got to be the worst.
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I have some friends who once told me that when they were kids, their family had to get set up in a hotel for like a month or something as the city fixed the plumbing at their home
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because it had, and this is as they said, it backed up into their house and flooded their entire home with poo water.
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That's the worst.
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No.
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The other problem is this, when you go from times of bad drought and not much rainfall, the poop can actually sit in the sewer line and not get moved into the sewer system all
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the way out.
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So think of it like you have a big uh pipe and you're trying to run, let's say, like chocolate-flavored marshmallow buddies down it.
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and you get it thing halfway up, but then there's not enough water to help it move down.
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And so now you just have the little like chocolate flavored human not good.
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Why did I do marshmallows?
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That's wow.
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I am there's something it's too late.
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I need to go to bed.
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ah And then when the big rains come you've heard of big rain.
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That's when big rain comes from blue sky and we finish blessing those rains down in Africa or wherever we've blessed them.
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It reverse flushes the poop that failed to pass through the tube.
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So you have a little poo buddy hanging out in the tube.
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The rain comes, reverse flushes it, and shoots that back to the surface.
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In this case, the surface is, get it, inside of your home domicile.
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Bad news.
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Red alert, bad news.
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Another big concern for summer sewage is foliage.
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Spring and summer are the months when the green things grow.
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And with added watering, the roots start shooting.
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And now I would like to take you to another
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impromptu segment of craptastic apps.
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As you have your summer foliage growing, um you might want to identify some of the summer foliage.
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One of the fun things that my son has been doing is he has been, when we go on walks or in the backyard or in grandma grandma and grandpa's house, he's been using this app.
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And it obviously, yes, it comes with a premium version.
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What app doesn't come with a premium version?
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But what you do is you take pictures of your plants.
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So you can take a picture of a plant in your yard and it will search some sort of database and tell you about the plant.
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So the app is called um Picture This, Identify Plants.
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So Picture This, Identify Plants.
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And what you do is you just take a picture of the plant and it will tell you what it is, like scientific name.
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The cool thing that we've been enjoying on the app is other things that the plant is related to, which is just always interesting.
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And like I said, it has a premium version.
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What app doesn't these days?
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I know.
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ah But yeah, and you can do like a 360 identify.
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You can even like set up a my garden and have it remind you to water, which is kind of cool.
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The other thing it does that's really neat for those of you that like your plants.
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is you can, when it take a picture, can diagnose like if your plants are over watered or if they're missing nutrients or something based on the pictures it takes.
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Yeah, it's a pretty cool app.
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Here's what I'd say.
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First of all, the app itself, I'm gonna give it, I'm gonna give it a four out of five.
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It's a very good app.
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Now, how it relates to bathrooming is gonna get a zero out of five.
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Mostly because unless you are...
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What I would say, higher class than me, you don't have plants in your bathroom to photograph and so this is not really an app that you can use while you craps.
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That's all there is to it.
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You can maybe look through it and peruse it little bit, but you're not actively gonna be using this app while you poop.
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So it's gonna get a zero out of five on usability while pooping.
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Now, four out of five on is it cool, zero out of five on usability while pooping, but.
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it's going to get a 7 out of 5 because again this system is completely made up and pointless but it's going to get 7 out 5 on education because if it gets my son or any kid
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pumped about figuring out what plants are and learning something that's a thumbs up in my book.
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So the picture this identify plants app check it out craptastic apps and now back to summer sewage.
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The foliage can cause some problems with summer.
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Because spring and summer are the months when the green things grow.
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The roots can often and do often grow toward and through sewer lines.
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In our old home, I shared that we have recently moved in the last couple months, but in our old home years and years ago, before we lived there, there was this big tree in the
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front yard.
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and the previous owners at some point in time had the tree cut down, the stump remained above ground, but underground many of the roots were still alive and began to recede.
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And some of them had grown through the sewer line for our house.
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And when we bought the place, the root was still running through the line.
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And then four to five years later, when we sold the home, that root had receded.
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as the plant had further decayed.
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But underground, what we didn't see was many of those roots were still alive and began to move.
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And some of them had grown through the sewer line and when we bought the place, yeah.
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So in the summer roots spread out, they tap into the sewer lines and can actually puncture the sewer lines over time.
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Consequently, what doesn't help this is when cracks in sewer lines form,
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There's essentially just a slow trickle of fertilizer that is eking out of those cracks, which is what happens to me when I eat too much Taco Bell.
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There's just a little bit of trickle of fertilizers.
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And the roots aim towards the fertilizer.
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They move towards the nutrients.
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And in doing so, the little amounts of shoot, that's poopy, that are coming out of the cracks attracts the roots, poop roots, poop roots.
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And when they do, the roots mess with the sewage and the sewer lines.
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Clogs and cracks and further troubles afoot.
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Summer lovin', more like summer cloggin'.
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I don't know, I was trying to go back to the other thing.
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On top of all these concerns that the plumbing goes through, it goes through a rigorous load during the summer.
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Rigorous load.
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The kids are home from school and to college.
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You're having guests and friends and family over more often.
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You're grilling out and maybe not eating as well and maybe eating a little bit more fattier of a diet.
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People are home using the pooper all day rather than just morning and evenings.
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All these add to a new load to the sewer system.
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And if you hear that and go, yeah, right, like it makes even a big difference.
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In the plumbing world, most plumbers
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are aware of a day of the year called Brown Friday.
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This is the Friday after Thanksgiving.
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It's not Black Friday to them, it's Brown Friday.
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Because it's the Friday that they often receive the most calls of the season on one single day.
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People have yabbed down too much gobbler, too much pankin pie, too many taters, and the very, and then every single buddy who yammed all that stuff,
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takes a deuce and Uncle Tony clogs that goose and who you call Mario, nobody should ever say it like that, Mario and Luigi here to plumb that noise.
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Brown Friday, happy Brown Friday plumbers.
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I'm sorry.
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And though the summer months experience this to a lesser degree, it's the same phenomenon.
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You got more folks, you got more poo traffic.
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It's just more likely to cause
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something to happen.
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More use equals a higher likelihood of failure.
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But how can you know if you're having problems?
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Let's say it's summer and you're like, man, I don't know if I'm having summer sewage problems.
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Well, the main trick is to just watch the drains.
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If the drains don't drain as quick, you probably got yourself a clog somewhere.
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If
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They make a gurgling sound?
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You guessed it.
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Clog.
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If you have lower water pressure, I got a word for you here.
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Four letter word, clog.
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On top of this, if the sewer is clogged and it begins to cause further problems, you might smell it.
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Like it might be, huh, sentable.
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Poop, interestingly enough, fun fact about poop.
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is when it is kept wet and allowed to sit, it smells bad, go figure.
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Septic smell or rotten egg smell from your drain or toilets could be a sign that you have, say it with me, a clog.
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If you're not on sewer and you have septic and you're having problems here, one of the ways you can tell
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is if you look where your septic tank is and the grass is greener, sometimes when the grass is greener it's because your septic tank is leaking a little bit of dookie.
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You might have greener and wetter grass in the area where the septic tank is.
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That means you have looks both ways, sees if anybody is ready for this one, a clog.
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No, but you do have a problem and you need to call someone.
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This happens, this like I said,
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at the top of the show.
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This happened where I worked one time.
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The septic system had something and it did this and it actually backed up, the septic backed up into one of the toilets and then it started to smell dank outside.
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was rancid.
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And they just slapped the sign on the bathroom door.
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says, not use, out of order.
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Yeah, it's because the septic has gone reverse into that toilet.
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Bad news bears.
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They called and had it serviced.
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I remember they had to dig that whole noise up and like take care of it.
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It was a mess.
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In short, people love summer for different reasons, but they love it.
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We love sewers.
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You don't think about it.
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But when you shoot brown into, if you don't like shooting brown into a bucket and then like taking that out of doors to dump it, then guess what?
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You like sewers.
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You do.
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And when the two things we like,
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and we care about summer and sewers are at odds, it's important to be on the lookout and look for ways to try to ease the sewer load this time of year.
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Yeah, summer sewers.
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I hope you guys do not have summer sewer problems this summer or any summer.
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And I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Privycast.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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Yeah, thank you for listening to me talk about sewage in bathrooms.
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What a thing.
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As always, we would love for you to connect with us on social media.
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We're at Privycast on all social media.
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ah Come say hello.
27:35
Shoot us a like, follow us, see what's going on over there.
27:38
Trying to post some images and some history and other additional facts that don't make the show.
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Share those with a friend and contact us.
27:48
privycast at gmail.com.
27:51
We would love to hear from you.
27:52
Say hi, say what's up.
27:54
If you have a fun bathroom story, hit us up, but it doesn't have to be a bathroom story.
27:59
Just leave us a comment.
28:00
We'll try to read some on the show.
28:01
We would love to read some of those when we get them.
28:03
Share the show.
28:07
I know it seems like not a lot, but if you share the show with three people, word of mouth is huge and we would love for more people to just enjoy something about bathrooms.
28:19
If you got a friend who uses a bathroom, tell them what's up.
28:24
Leave us a rating if you can in the pod catcher of your choice.
28:27
uh yeah, that just helps other people who might just be searching to find the show.
28:33
A few other things that I don't normally plug.
28:36
you like Privycast, like WordPress, Privycast, I don't know what the thing is, but there's some material and content over there to go look at.
28:45
Check it out.
28:47
Yeah, and like I said, we'd love to hear from you.
28:49
Thank you guys so much for being a part of the Privycast community.
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Help grow it.
28:54
As always, we'd like to thank Kevin McLeod for the use of Bar Room Ballet as our intro and outro music.
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You can find Kevin's music at Incompetech.org.
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He's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
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Thanks, Kevin.
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This has been another episode of Privy.
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I'm Hunter Hoover.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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And now, as always, don't forget to flush.