Living: Water

You know what I can't live without? Running water. I can manage without power, and without a whole lot of other things, but not water. But right now, our water is fine and I'm a bit annoyed about that.

You want to know why? (Come on, you know I'm going to tell you anyway.)

On Monday I was happily going about my day when I was informed by a friend that the water would be giong off.  For. Three. Days.  Apparently it wasn't expected back on until Thursday.  I panicked a lot just a little.  

The Thursday prior the water had gone off sometime during the night and was not on when we woke up.  On that particular day, no one had courteously advised us of the problem.  Our water filter, thankfully, has a 15 litre storage tank.  So I could make coffee.  But I couldn't shower or wash my hair (and, trust me, it needed it), so I headed off to work unwashed and grumpy.  I came home after 6pm. Still no water.  We bought some drinking water ($1 for 20 litres, can't complain about that).  But again I couldn't shower, I couldn't do some of the washing that was overflowing from the basket, or attack the mountain of crusty dishes that had accumulated during the day, or flush the toilet.  Although I could do a little wash down, I still went to bed feeling like my skin was crawling and not knowing when we would have water again.  At 3 am we heard the toilet cistern filling up again.  The Boy got to drag himself out of bed and check that we wouldn't be flooded due to any taps we had inadvertently left on (has happened to us before).

So when I heard the news on Monday, I was determined that I wasn't going to have the same terrible time that I'd had the last week. There was no definite information about when the outage would start.  So we leapt back on our moto and sped home.

We are not as well-prepared as our neighbours, most of whom have a few large ceramic water storage containers (like the one shown above).  So we filled every receptacle in our house, buckets, water bottles, old  bottles, basins, kettles and pots.  All the time cursing our landlord for not connecting the massive water storage tank that sits on our roof.  I jumped in the shower and washed my hair again - just so the clean feeling would last that little bit longer.  We put on the washing machine, watered the plants and scrubbed the bathroom.  We filled up the coffee machine.  Every time we turned on the tap we watched with baited breath to see whether anything came out.  And every time it did.  By the afternoon I was a little annoyed.  We'd given up our whole day too prepare, and we were prepared, and now nothing was happening.  By night time the Boy had upset one of the countless buckets on the landing and water had gone everywhere; but the water was still on.  We stopped refilling bottles of water every time we had a drink.  Oh well.  They hadn't said when exactly the water was going off, maybe it'd be at night.  By Tuesday it would be off and we'd be so pleased that we were so prepared.

But now it's Wednesday night, and the water is still on.  And you know what?  I'm cross.  Cross that I have buckets of water everywhere - and they're not even needed.  For the first time ever, I'm annoyed that we have running water.

(I am also seriously considering in one of those big ceramic pots... just need to figure out how to get it up the stairs!)