what do you prefer: bath or shower. and why

Hi @Ruhappy, I might have seen the movie a long time ago but I think there may have had a movie (may be that same one) that had the typewriter song. I guess the best way to find out is to dig up a copy of that movie (probably easier said than done now!
Hi again, Rita, if you think you're a genuine amateur in playing the piano then compared to my piano skills you leave me in the dust!!:O But as for reading notes compared to me, you are definitely way up in the stratosphere! :D
But buying a motel in a ski town sounds like a real dream of a lifestyle! If it were me I would be out on the slopes every day! My uncle in Maine skied until well into his 80s and so far in Florida I've only found extremely poor skiing and not all that much snow!! So I guess running a ski resort in Florida isn't going to happen!!
 
Hi @snow, that was sure a nice sweet thing you asked of @ritanofsinger I think we all would need to get in line to have Rita become a surrogate grandmother to us. She is full of great stories and adventure. And aren't we lucky she has found us? :D
 
shower. It's faster and more sanitary than sitting around stewing in your dirty bathwater. Baths can be super relaxing and all but for regular daily bathing I'm all about a quick shower. When sick, I like just standing in the shower breathing in the steam. IDK about other countries, but in the US baths are typically not very manly and tend to be a women's thing.
 
I only shower. As I heard a wise man say::) " I took a bath Jerry....I sat in a tepid pool of my own filth"
(kramer from seinfeld) That about sums it up for me. Plus I like to shave in the shower so that adds to the not interested in sitting in a tub.
 
billiveshere and snow -- you are both very kind. I have four children, seven grandchildren and 10 great-grands (2 in Texas age 2 and 1 who I've yet to see) with another due December 31. But I know they'd all approve of additions, no line required! I used to read a little book to my last grandchild about a family in Ireland who sang "There's always room for one more." That's always been my motto. When we had our motel and we were in the midst of a great ski season one night all the motels in town were completely full. We accommodated a young man desperate for a place to stay by setting up a roll-a-way bed in our walk-in closet where we kept extra blankets, pillows etc. There was no heat in the room but with all the stuff it was sort of insulated. He insisted on paying us too. And we learned that the Holiday Inn also put up skiers in their linen closet.

When I was a church goer, our friends there were always asking us,"How many people are living with you now?" It seemed to be a foreign concept and worth a laugh to most people that we would take into our home so many others. We had a Russian scientist stay with us for six weeks while he was working at the University and two times we took in women with Multiple Personality Disorder until they could get hospitalization. Once while we had two pre-school granddaughters living with us we took in my friend's homeless single daughter and her three pre-school children for three months. I have a three bedroom, 1 bath and 3/4 bath ranch style home with a large room that a previous owner built on to the house. So whenever we needed bed space we just rearranged furniture or changed the use of a room to be able to provide for people. My husband was a gourmet cook and a jack-of-all-trades so we seldom had to pay out-of-hand for any repairs for house or vehicle. As I've said, I've had a great life even with a lot of challenges.
 
billieveshere -- What's funny about having a motel in the ski area is that we were so busy running the motel and the other three businesses we picked up that we seldom got to participate in the sport. Our kids did. I went one time at Copper Mountain and cross-country one time near Breckenridge, CO with my youngest daughter. My husband went to Arapahoe, Beaver Run and Copper Mtn. a few times with our boys. It was a hard life for the first 8 years, 24/7 work and we only ever had three employees besides our kids to run the business. But what a great life experience we had.

Tourists look at the businesses in the "tourist economy" and think everybody is making a lot of money. But it's a fantasy. Even the corporations that own the big resorts are always hustling to make ends meet. When guests stole from us, pillows, towels, blankets, even furniture we had to replace things and like the grocery stores we had to buy in a quantity that sometimes was prohibitive. Colorado had motel/hotel laws that protected the business owner and a few times we had to resort to using those laws. But mostly our guests were good people and we became friends with some, even one from Australia.

(Sometimes I get to writing these little tidbits and forget to hit reply. So if I seem to repeat myself you'll know that I'm trying to remember what I deleted!)
 
Hi @ritanofsinger, I think you could write a book on all of your experiences! It's really cool how you took in all of those people and it looked like you refused to turn anyone away especially when they needed a place to stay. You have grown very rich from all of the people you have met over your busy lifetime and all of the friends you have made. I do understand that owning a motel in ski country would have many challenges of its own especially when you had to pay for pilfered towels, blankets and furniture, but it's always nice to dream! I don't think I could do it at this point in my life. And the reality is you get so busy with just making ends meet that a day on the slopes is probably a rarity! But such are the fantasies! It's always nice to dream!
 
Stevewet, I don't remember doing it myself but on a radio cerial drama I listen to called the bradshaws, they mention it all the time
it's set during the 1960's, so I guess it is still quite a recent thing.

I don't know when the bath tub was invented (like the ones we use today), I guess it's quite recent
 
At the nature center where I volunteer and do the field trips we have a curriculum about water and we have the kids do a relay race carrying buckets of water just like they did in the days before running water so kids would realize that people didn't always have running water which we take for granted now.
We also show them a water pump with the handle, just like they had on the old farms, and it's connected to a pipe that just recirculates the water and the kids take turns with pumping. And we also show them a large tin tub like the type you're describing @Stevewet. We point out that in a big family on a Saturday night dad gets to get in the tub first and then mom, and then all of the kids and we explain how dirty the water gets after the last kid has been in. We mention the old expression "throw out the baby with the bath water." We let the kids pretend they are in a big family and they all take turns getting in the rub to see what it was like during their great-great-great-great grandparents time.
 
billiveshere - you write the most wonderful responses to everyone's stories and quips. Thank you so much for your generosity and encouragements. I have to share an incident that taught me something about homeless people.

My youngest son and his two elementary aged children plus another of my grandchildren were living with my husband and I. We were just sitting down to a late breakfast when the door bell rang. I opened the door to a smiling young man, probably mid-20's, who asked me if I would give him some money to get something to eat. Our home is located a block from a busy traffic intersection. I told him that I didn't have any cash but, we were just sitting down to eat and he was welcome to come in and eat with us. So he did. With some prodding he told us that he really wanted to join the military but that they wouldn't take him because of his bad teeth. He somewhat reluctantly gave me his email where he could be reached. I contacted my dentist friend who was willing to fix the man's teeth for free so I made an appointment for the young man. But no, the email wasn't valid. So I called Dr. M. and canceled the appointment.

I learned a lot from that encounter with such a needy person. Sometimes people live in a fantasy world of their own making for whatever reasons and like that young man, he apparently didn't want any help or didn't want to commit to anything or who knows what. I learned that it's best to offer help but not get involved in their life unless they ask specifically for something. It's easy to give dollars to people in a parking lot or on a street corner, but my oldest son, who has spent half his life in and out of jail and prison due to his use of drugs and alcohol, cautioned me to not be so willing to succumb to their stories of need because the beggars only want the money for drugs. He knew that from experience.

I have learned several life lessons from related incidents. It's difficult most times to "walk in another person's shoes" because you don't know what led up to the present thing that's happening. I might have made the same choices based on what he had to deal with. Who knows?
 
I think you have to be in your 70s, maybe 60s, to have experienced the "Saturday night bath in the tin tub" thing. Probably rural, too. I was "city", the wife was "rural farm", and she remembers that, and I didn't have the experience. In the summer, in the cottage we shared on lake Michigan, us kids got sent to the lake with a bar of "American Family" soap (harsh and brown laundrey soap), hauled to the lake by the ear, if necessary. Her childhood was near the end of the family farm era, which began to end with the Great Depression.
My mother grew up very poor, in the big city. I never remember her relating that story, but she and her sisters didn't tell many stories, for whatever reason. "We grew up poor, dad was a tailor and we lived in the back, dad died when I was in high school, we stayed poor during the depression, i met your father about that time."
Bath tubs aren't as "recent" as you think. The shape and size was already there - in tin - by the the late 1880s, I think, in England. The porcelain-over-iron, that we grew up with, is probably about 1900-1910. I saw an old documentary showing the technique - they get the iron red hot and hand-tossed powder on that portion of the iron. Safety was not first! The heat must have been appalling.
I wonder what the disease-transmission rate was from that "whole family-serial-bath" thing. It had to be high. 5 kids might share one bedroom, too.
Imagine if you were a bed-wetter. Kids can be very cruel, on the playground or in the home. If caught, discipline was hard, too. That's farm or big city!
 
emily91 -- I Googled when the bathtub was invented. Wikipedia has a really good history. One of my granddaughters says that you can't trust Wikipedia because anybody can contribute to it. But generally they ask you to verify the source of your information or at least cite where your info came from. All information comes from someone! But it looks like the bathtub as we know it today, was "probably" invented in 1883.

In the 1960's I wrote a whole page newspaper feature article with several photos, about a mysterious old house in the foothills in northern Colorado. The woman who currently owned the house had a wonderful tale of the history of the house. I took photos of the quaint bathroom with a tub and a circular shower above it. Quite a piece of art actually.

I learned a good lesson about checking for facts then too. She told me a bit of the story that was hearsay, she didn't know if it was true. I related the story just as she told me (I had a recorder.)Later the nephew of the man who built the house contacted the publisher. He was quite upset that I had told an embarrassing rumor. I got chewed out by the newspaper publisher and had to figure out how to make it right. I called the relative and got an interview with him, to set the story right. He and his wife had a great love story to tell about their own lives which made my publisher a lot happier.
 
WIKI is much more strict, now. Yes, anyone can contribute, but you are right, you have to have research and "proof", and someone can come along and correct it. They have to have proof, too. There is a volunteer committee looking for "truth or fiction". I see articles where WIKI mentioned that, on dubious or incomplete articles, they ask for proof or references.
Like the Darwin Award. When i contributed an article, i sent in the links to the proof. It got clarified and published. It took them 2 weeks.
I questioned the WIKI article on "riding the rods" by hobos, and was told it was probably myth. There are actual you-tube videos of modern versions of "riding the rods" (look for "Stobe the hobo"), for one example), but to WIKI's standards, you-tube doesn't count. Stobe's life is partially documented, though. I have seen too many written stories - and would love to research it. Jack London has a story - pretty exaggerated, I think. But there is a list of "hobos" who road the rods and later became successful, some famous.
I have a sign, got it from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It's from passenger trains era, and I remember it from my childhood. "Kindly flush toilet after Each use, Except when train is standing in station". And we used to walk along the tracks - or on the ties - when we were kids! Visitor get a chuckle. One asked me if we were a station.

In each railroad car there should be,
A red and green light you can see,
From near or afar,
When the door's not ajar,
To tell when the bathroom is free.

Edward Nash probably wrote that. Now why do I remember that from my childhood? I can remember such trivia better than yesterday's lunch. But Edward Nash is much more amusing than yesterday's lunch.
 
Hi AlasSouth -- You probably mean Ogden Nash? A prodigious funny author. My great-grandmother had occasion in the early 1940s to give bologna sandwiches to men (presumed to be Hoboes) who disembarked the train running through Kansas. Her house was the second from the railroad tracks going east and west near the station house. The travelers came to her back door. I remember a documentary on PBS some time ago about hoboes. It was pretty interesting. PBS has some great documentaries. Jack London was a real story-teller and most story tellers do exaggerate. As long as writers admit it's fiction I don't mind a tall tale.
 
A slipper tub looks like it would give you good neck and head good support. I have seen and tried a few of the claw-foot bathtubs. I was much younger and I thought they were mounted kind of high for my likes.
 
My husband and I bought an older two-story house in the 1970s that had a clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom. Our four kids had bedrooms upstairs so at first we didn't notice an obnoxious odor coming from that bathroom. But one night while I was sleeping in my daughter's room helping her to wake up when she wet the bed I really noticed the odor. On investigating it seemed to be coming from under the tub. I pulled up the carpet thinking that maybe it was moldy or something. But a few days later the odor was still there. I pulled up another carpet. Then another to the wood floor. There didn't seem to be any reason for the horrible smell. Bill pulled up a board and then we saw it. Piles of bat guano. He took the tub out and put it in the backyard near the alley fence.

Having a full bath downstairs and with the intention of remodeling anyway we commenced pulling up the floor boards. Bill shoveled three buckets of the stinky stuff and put it on our garden. So we continued pulling off the walls to the studs - there was no insulation in the walls either. But the bat urine had been there so long that it was crystalized in one big giant drip against the outside wall of the house and we had to chip it off with chisels. It was like chipping diamonds (which I've never done but have a good imagination!)

Bill watched the bats leave that evening and climbed up a ladder to the roof where he found the bat's "doorway" and covered it securely so they couldn't return.

That night I awoke hearing a swooshing noise and saw two bats circling our bedroom at the ceiling.
Apparently the bats that had flown away had left some of their young who had come down from the attic through the open walls in the bathroom and in the kitchen where Bill had been putting in extra electrical outlets. So we spent the next few exciting days catching the bats with Bill's motorcycle gloves and tossing the cute little animals outside.

The Georgeian style house next door to us had bats too that we had seen coming out from under their roof in the evening. We had had some fun tossing bits of bread into the air for the bats to catch, not realizing that we also had "bats in our belfry."

A few days later I noticed that my bathtub was gone. I wrote a Letter to the Editor asking for whoever stole it to return it. They didn't. But a local realtor contacted me that he was remodeling a house, had taken out a clawfoot tub and he would bring it to me if I wanted it. So he did.

We continued to work on remodeling our bathroom and exposed an inside brick wall lending a personal touch to the bathroom. A couple years later we sold the house to a youngish couple who continued remodeling and listed it on the Historical registry. We visited them from our new state about 10 years later and were happy to see that they had made the changes that we had envisioned doing. We had a 10-year-old granddaughter with us who got to see the bedroom that her mother slept in at the same age as her.
 
In the 1970s my husband and I purchased an old two story house that had at one time been converted into two apartments. The upstairs bathroom had a clawfoot HEAVY bathtub. There was an obnoxious odor at some times of the day which seemed to be coming from under the bathtub. Investigating this I pulled the carpet out and well- there was another carpet. A few days later the odor was still there, so I pulled up the carpet and lo and behold there was another carpet under that. But the odor would not go away. So since we had a full bath downstairs and our intent was to remodel the house anyway we started tearing out the floor. So the bathtub had to go. We set it in the backyard near the alley fence so that I could fill it with soil and plant flowers in it. I'd seen that done in a magazine!

We ripped out the floor and all the walls to the studs. What we discovered was bats living in the walls and their urine had dripped and piled up in the walls and the floor. When the bats flew out at night there was no odor but when they returned Whew!! it was ghastly. We chipped at the solidified urine to get as much as we could and my husband filled buckets of feces which we put on our garden.

Bill found where the bats were entering but he had to wait until they left in the evening so he could climb up the ladder to the area just under the eaves. He covered their "doorway" with wood. But the next day when the bats usually departed, we learned that they had left their very young behind the day before so suddenly in the night I awoke to see a couple bats circling overhead in our bedroom. They had come down through the open walls where we were working and in a kitchen wall where Bill was working on adding electric outlets. We had a few days of exciting evenings catching the bats with Bill's motorcycle gloves and tossing them outside.

We had seen bats leaving the Georgian style house next door in the evening and had great fun tossing bread crumbs into the air for them. At that time we had no idea that we also had "bats in our belfry!" A few days later I discovered that somebody had come through the alley and stolen my clawfoot tub. I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the local newspaper asking the person to please bring it back. They didn't. However, a local realtor called me saying he was remodeling a house and had a clawfoot tub that he would bring over to me. So I got a tub back. And over the next few months we managed to remodel the upstairs bathroom with a very nice modern tub and shower. And found that the inside walls were brick which we left exposed to give the room a personal touch.

We sold the house a couple years later. The youngish couple who bought it completed remodeling it and listed it on the Historical Registry. We visited them about 10 years later and they had done a miraculous job, fixing it like we had envisioned. When the war in Vietnam ended my husband carved into the front doorstep -- PEACE IS AT OUR DOORSTEP. His older brother had served two tours as a helicopter pilot.
 
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