Running Water Ran Away

Six days ago was Sunday. Tony and I woke up, got ready as usual, and went to church. When we got home, we noticed that the water was off. This happens with surprising frequency in Iliff, so we shrugged and Tony went off to work.

A few hours later Landlady called me and said I should go to the preschool/town hall to go pick up our family water allotment and explained how the water line into town goes under the South Platte river, and it also broke under the river. With the water still high from recent flooding, crews wouldn't be able to fix it right away. She said we might be without water as long as five days. Emergency crews placed porta potties all around town, and a truck with these giant water bladders was parked outside the preschool to refill your water as needed.

Ugh.

We're on day six now, and the news article I read today warns us to expect to be without water for another 10 days at least. (Fingers crossed for June 14th!)

UGH.

But the reason I am writing this post is actually to share some amusing and eye opening experiences we have had.

1. We (collective "we") use a TON of water. Tony and I are very lucky to have an old cast iron hand pump well in our back yard. The water is not safe to drink, but it is good enough to flush our toilet and water our gardens. We have tried to eat foods that can be microwaved on disposable dishware so we don't have to waste precious drinking water to wash dishes. Unfortunately, we had a sink full of dishes to be washed on Sunday. I plugged up both sides of the sink and tried to do a dirty water/clean rinse water type thing to save water, and just barely covering the bottom of both sinks with a few inches of water took four gallons. There went most of the allotment we had gotten! I went into town the next day and filled up our 7 gallon camp water jug thing.

1.5. The toilet. *sigh* I figured out pretty quickly last Sunday that we don't have many large capacity containing things in our house. In fact, all we have is our kitchen trash can. Even it is rather small for a kitchen trash can, maybe four gallons? But it is our only large containy thingy, so its job right now is to hold well water in the bathroom. Tony and I take turns going out to the well and filling the trash can with water. Then we have a smaller bucket to scoop water from the trash can to the toilet so we can flush. Classy, I know...I never promised that. One flush takes two to three gallons of water. Please note aforementioned capacity of trash can. Yeah. So if the trash can is low at 11:30pm, and ya wanna flush...

1.75. Watering the garden. Okay, big water container has drinking water in it. Trash can has well water for the bathroom in it. The next biggest thing we have is a gallon ice cream container. This is what we use to water our gardens right now. We used to think it was a chore to go outside, turn on the spigot, and stand in one spot and spray the plants. HA! Not any more. We eagerly anticipate being able to resume use of our garden hose.

2. So those porta potties around town... In the morning you can see people sleepily lumbering down the street in their pajamas and flip flops to the nearest porta potty. (No, I'm not a creep. They walk past my house, okay, gosh.)

3. Brother-in-Law just moved to Sterling (Nearest bigger town to Iliff, 12 miles away). Before he got his own place, he sofa surfed at our house for a few weeks. I bet he didn't think he would be returning some much needed kindness so quickly. As soon as he got the key to his place we helped him move in some boxes, then shoved our laundry in the washer and commandeered both showers.
Clean hair feels amazing, btw.

4. After six days I have finally gotten out of the habit of trying to flush the toilet via the little silver handle. I went into work for a meeting today (in a different building than usual) and almost had a heart attack when the toilet flushed itself.

5. I have NOT gotten out of the habit of turning on the bathroom sink to wet my toothbrush, then rinse it off when I am done. And every time I turn it on and absolutely nothing happens, I get sad all over again. For some reason this has been the most emotionally taxing part of not having running water. I just wanna rinse the toothpaste off my fraggin' toothbrush!!! =( =(

I won't #LightItUpBlue, I will #WalkInRed for Autism Acceptance

Tomorrow, April 2nd, Autism Speaks has declared to be "Autism Awareness Day", and that we should #LightItUpBlue.

Please allow me to explain why this is very problematic. And because my momma taught me good, I will present a solution with each problem.

ONE:

INSTEAD:

Awareness is not needed anymore. We all know autism exists. Sadly, the organization big business (Autism Speaks) which made the world more aware of autism did it in a mean, hateful way. Case in point, THIS video they put out in the late 2000s. (copyright says 2008, content says 1300) The past couple years AS has become more subtle and two-faced about this. Some of the things they actually say and post online seem to be loving, but actions speak louder than words. See below.

TWO:

INSTEAD:

Take a look at Autism Speaks' budget. It's a mess. Did you know they spend more annually on catering than they do on services for autistic people/their families? Yuck. But hey! 38% towards research! Except the research they do is things like prenatal testing (similar to Downs syndrome) so you can abort your autistic child before they are born. Yay eugenics! Oh wait... That also means they think an autistic life is a life not worth living.

The most infamous research AS does is to "find a cure". But that's a load of heart-warming pseudoscience. Autism itself is not a thing. Autism is a collection of things. Look at the DSM 5 if you don't believe me (though the diagnostic criteria therein is also problematic...based exclusively on young white males). Anyways, autism is a collection of things. Think of it like a froyo bar. There are dozens of toppings available, you need at least five to qualify. Sensory processing issues, executive functioning disorder, face blindness, social phobia....lots of things. Collect enough of these, THEN that is autism. "Curing" autism is a really fluffy, vague idea. In order to do so you would have to resolve a large number of other smaller things. Saying you want to cure autism is like saying you want to cure "sicknesses". Okay...which one? There are a lot and you have to treat each one differently. As advanced as science is now, it's still not up to the task of "curing autism".

ALSO...many/most adult autistic self-advocates don't want a cure. Autistic adults want to be accepted and loved, not tolerated and cured or "normalized". Enter neurodiversity movement. Citizen Autistic is a great documentary on neurodiversity. (I think you can find the full thing on Hulu?)

Across the US, Autism Speaks has huge fundraising walks. They raise enormous amounts of money with each walk. And yet, it takes several of those walks just to fund the salaries of several of their top-most leaders. In 2012, the president of Autism Speaks made $436,314.00. (For comparison, ASAN President made $65,000 that same year.)

THREE:

INSTEAD: Well, the answers are in the same graphic up there...

Once upon a time, Autism Speaks did have ONE autistic member of their science advisory committee . John Elder Robison joined the committee hoping to steer them in a more positive direction. After several years of trying, he finally had to cut his losses, so he quit. Here is the blog post he wrote about leaving AS.

Autism Self Advocacy Network was founded by and is totally run by autistic adults. Even by some people who are nonverbal (commonly called "low functioning". More here on why functioning labels aren't helpful: article by wonderful (nonverbal) autistic self advocate, Amy Sequenzia).

See this Logo to the left? It's ironic. Autism Speaks, it's time to listen! But they don't. AS flatly refuses to listen to autistic people. Example: for AS tenth anniversary several weeks ago, they started a new hashtag #AutismSpeaks10. They asked people to fill this hashtag with examples of how AS had touched them. Autistic self advocates saw an opportunity and ran with it. 

After a couple days of this hashtag being hijacked, AS quietly switched to #AutismChampions. They did not respond to or acknowledge the thousands of tweets from upset #ActuallyAutistic people. Within hours this hashtag was also hijacked. (Note: AS has since scrubbed their website of it, but for years they supported research linking vaccines to autism.)

So I could go on and on, but I won't. I guess what I am trying to say is, be careful when you donate money to charities! They are NOT all created equal. 4 cents of every dollar going to help autistic people and their families is not a responsible use of donations.

Also, do a little research when you see things like" #LightItUpBlue for autism awareness!" Or the Ice Bucket Challenge last summer...I recall their being some doubt about that organizations spending habits too...

As for me, I will #WalkInRed2015 tomorrow and donate to Autism Self Advocacy Network, because I can trust them to be financially responsible and actually work on making this world a better place.

Synesthesia

I have synesthesia. Don't worry, it's not harmful (and sadly) not contagious. Synesthesia has been defined and explained over and over again, so I will not (also not the point of this post so). Here is the wiki about synesthesia. Also, if you suspect you may be a fellow synnie, go here for a nifty test!

I will give you a few minutes to go read those, mmkay?

SO. I have grapheme synesthesia. This means letters and numbers each have a unique and SPECIFIC color for me. I am not a projecting synnie, but rather a "mind's eye" synnie. I don't literally see text in rainbow colors, but when I look at words/numbers/etc my brain attaches that extra color information to the characters I see. (Note: some mind's-eye synnies, when inebriated become projecting, so they actually see printed text in color! I wouldn't know though.)

This chart will give a a rough idea of my colors. The colors are not even close to the exact shades I want them to be, but hey, technology...amiright? I did not randomly make up these color associations, and I cannot change them. I don't even like some of these colors, but again, I have no control over them.

It cracks me up in TV shows when a character has synesthesia (Heroes) because their colors are always beautiful and coordinate nicely. Reality is not so kind. Pull out your crayons/colored pencils/markers and write your name in my colors. Probably not very pretty. I get excited when I meet someone who has a name where all the letters look good together. Spelling is also critical to me. Kathryn=/=Catherine=/=Katherin. I always want to know how someone spells their name so I can see the colors in my mind properly. I feel let down when I get to know someone named Sean, and then find out weeks later he spells it Shawn or Shaun. Gak! It's like I don't even know them.

These color/character associations are incredibly strong. Trying to tell me the number 4 is green is like trying to convince any non-colorblind person that the sky is yellow with neon pink polka dots. Not going to happen anytime soon...

Synesthesia can be both helpful and annoying. In an 8am college math course, it was a nuisance. I would wake up as late as possible and slide into my seat just as class started. Having only been out of my bed maybe twenty minutes, I was still rather sleepy. Tiredness has a similar effect on synesthesia as alcohol. Before I totally woke up my colors would project and I wouldn't be thinking straight, so my class warm ups looked something like this:

Which totally doesn't make sense because magenta plus medium purple equals sort of a light maroon, definitely NOT bright green. Ten minutes into class or so I would be more awake and my colors would be less pronounced.

One summer I worked as a painter. Oddly enough, one of my coworkers was also a music education major with grapheme synesthesia. We had interesting arguments.

Musical notation also has colors for me. The note colors correspond to the letter name colors. (G, any octave or clef is pumpkin orange. Accidentals do not change the color. Enharmonics are a NIGHTMARE.)

While fabric and scrapbook paper that look like this is cute, the colors are ALWAYS WRONG!!!1!

Synesthesia is vastly more common in children, but adults tend to ignore preschoolers who say things like, "Look daddy! The purple crayon is the mommy and the gold and blue ones are her twin babies!" This demonstrates yet another variety of synesthesia (there are anywhere from dozens to hundreds of types, depending on where you get your info.) I have experienced a few other types. (I'll save it for another post.) As a child I experienced a type where colors/letters/numbers/something has fixed and diverse personality/sex/gender/physical attributes. Mine was color --> personality/sex. My strongest memory of this flavor of synesthesia is from the four crayons and coloring page from restaurants.

In my next post about synesthesia I will try to illustrate the one time I experienced pain-->color. I will also try to draw some of the cooler/possibly more useful types (ticker tape, spatial calendar).