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!!! =( =(
