I Took The Kitchen Sink Apart... Lord, hear my prayer!

Have you ever noticed that a lot of really, really bad ideas sound like pure genius when you start?

...I sure have. Like mixing hot cocoa with the milkshake machine. That one resulted in me painting the kitchen ceiling. Twice! Yeah, twice. The mixer has two speeds...and...uh...yeah.

Anyhow, we've been fighting what I thought were moths. We've been fighting them since we moved into this place. The cats have become pretty adept at catching the fluttering beasties mid-air. I've been smashing them one at a time for a while, but we've never been able to get rid of them.

   My wife kept bird seed on the covered porch, the one right off the kitchen, and moths got into the house. It took me quite a while to figure out that's where they were coming from, and now we keep the bird seed in sealed plastic bins.

   It wasn't until recently that I noticed the moths were coming out of the drains in the kitchen sinks. They started out as what my grandfather called noseeums. Little gnats. I thought they were gnats, but we never had flies. Well, we had some flies after we tried an indoor composting thingie in the kitchen, but the flies went away when I decided composting is a purely outdoor activity.

   Today I decided enough was enough. I had experimented with dumping bleach down the drains, and even ammonia. That seemed to get rid of them for a while, but then a new crop would grow. I got tired of washing moth gunk (that started out as living moths) off the kitchen walls.

   This morning I did some research on line and found out that the moths aren't moths at all. They're flies. Fuzzy, flat-winged flies. Drain flies, some call them. Further research suggested buying an enzyme product that would eat the gunk in the drains where the flies lay their eggs. We didn't have any of that stuff, and rather than go somewhere to buy it, I decided to dump a bunch of random toxic liquids from under the kitchen sink into the drains. I poured a bunch of stuff down the drain. If the government knew what I dumped down there and put some scientists on it, I would probably end up on a bad boy list. I have no sense of smell, but it's probably a good thing my wife isn't home.

   Finally, I decided that the problem is gunk in the pipes, oozy gunk where flies had been laying eggs in spite of  (or because of) all the dishes done in the sink, all the stuff dumped in the sink, and because the plastic pipes had been there for years.

   So..in a fit of pure genius, I took the pipes apart. It's PVC stuff, and required no tools. It's good that it required no tools. I have no mechanical ability. In fact, I've been rated by top-notch IQ testers as impaired with things mechanical.

   I don't let that stop me when I'm in a fit of moronic genius. Not me!

   I took the pipes apart under the sink. There's only four or five of them--depending on how you count pipes. There was black, oozy gunk in all of them, particularly the U-shaped one at the bottom. I took them outside and scrubbed 'em good! They're clean now. Clean as new. Take that you fuzzy moth-imitatin' flies! Ha!

There's only one problem... I have no idea how to put them back the way they were.

Now I think I'll take a nap. I'll leave my wife a note asking her to please re-assemble the kitchen sink before she uses it. Wish me luck. Something tells me I'll need it.