Friday Dec 18,2009

I went to Utah. Finally after over a year I saw my family. I have missed them so much. This is Friday adventures. I woke early took brother Brent to work at the poop factory-more on that later-I had plans to visit Alicia my longest friend but she got suddenly ill and we were not able to meet up. So I texted brother Daniel. He is a technical support guy for Sorensen Relay. What? You are asking yourself...It is a phone service for the deaf. There is a camera so an operator can see the person making the phone call. The person uses sign language to communicate what needs to be said and the operator tells the person on the other end what the deaf person said. Make sense??? Well he helps people who are having issues with their unit and helps customers install their units. He is so cute isnt he...we met up at In N Out for burgers. It was so fun to see him before Christmas.



This is brother Brent. Almost 2 months ago he was at work in the golf cart seen above. He took a tumble and next thing he knew he was in the hospital with a splitting headache. He has been told that he fell down, lost consciousness and when he came to he did not know who he was. That lasted for a short time. At the hospital his wife Jenni was shocked to learn that Brent thought she was the neighbor girl. Needless to say he had some serious brain trauma. He was in ICU for several days and then in the hospital for several more. Poor boy. I was out of my mind being in Portland and moving and working. I wanted to be there so bad.

Fast forward to Friday....I got the honor of going to the Orem City Waste Water Reclamation Plant. I got a private tour of where the poop goes...It did not stink very much. It was similar to entering a dental office...you know there is just a hint of cold sterile mixed with dry socket paste. Well first off the sewage goes into filters and all the non human products get filtered out (tampons, condoms etc--tp is dissolved). These products are then dried and compressed in the Muffin Monster. I think it is so funny they named the muffin monster!!!

Then the water goes to several ponds and undergoes several non chemical steps of sludge removal.
Oxygen is being added here.
In this pic water is trickled over these rocks which have snails, moss, bacteria etc that clean the water. This was the stinkiest place in the whole plant.

Then the water is clean. They add chlorine and some sulfur to make finalize the cleanliness. Then it is dumped into the marshes near Utah Lake. It is pretty amazing. It is pretty clean water. I was impressed at the chemistry involved. There was so many steps that my mind got a bit overwhelmed. My brothers made my first day back in Utah wonderful! I am so grateful that they are my brothers!