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Have I talked about water lately?
I have a tale of sorrow and woe (mine). Actually, it was my parents’ problem, but I shared in their misery, even if it was for only a day and a half.
Recently, my parent’s house, in St. George, Utah, developed a BIG plumbing leak out by the road. But they were leaving for a week and didn’t have time to take care of it and so they just turned the water off at the road and left. They were planning on coming back the next Wednesday and having a plumber come out and fix it – no problem, right? Wrong!
The problem started when my cousin, my daughter and I took a last minute sales trip to St. George, Utah, and Mesquite, Nevada, and we were going to stay at my parent’s house from Thursday to Saturday. I mean after all, my parents went back on Wednesday and got the water fixed, right? The only problem was that on our way down, I saw a truck pulling a trailer on the side of the road getting hooked up to a tow truck and it looked suspiciously like my parents’ rig. Then I saw another truck pulled over on the side of the road with somebody that looked just like my dad!
My parents had gotten a late start on Wednesday and so they decided to go back on Thursday instead, but then one of their trucks died just past Beaver, Utah. (Just as a side note, this is not the first time that they have had car trouble in the Beaver area, and I just have to let everyone know how wonderful and helpful the police in that area are. Thank you, law enforcement personnel for taking care of my parents). Long story short – we got to my parents’ house just about the same time that they did, late at night with NO WATER. More background information, this is during the peak of the summertime heat – 100++ degrees.
Thank goodness that my parents had taken my advice and stored a lot of water. My mom has been storing water in emptied out 2-liter pop bottles for quite some time and has built up quite an impressive water supply, which was a good thing because I found out that it takes a minimum of eight 2-liter bottles of water to flush the toilet – EACH TIME! (There were five people at the house, and you can do the math as to how much water we were going through.)
It takes at least one 2-liter bottle to wash my short hair and I was too tired to worry about anything else that night. It was a big inconvenience not to be able to shower because, well, because we were in St. George in the summer and that translates to a lot of sweat (the temperatures ranged between 110 degrees to a high of 117 degrees). All I can say is that I don’t know how the pioneers did it without air conditioning and running water. I still had the air conditioning, but not the running water and I felt like I was going to fall apart.
The moral of the story is STORE LOTS OF WATER! You never know when you are going to need it. It could be a personal disaster, like my parents, or it could be just the block that had a mainline rupture, or a community wide disaster and no water is flowing to anyone. If worse came to worse, and if my parents had not stored water, they could have gone to a motel (very expensive) or imposed on a neighbor (notice the word “imposed”), but because they had water, they were able to tough it out.
Remember, water is life. Please make sure that you get your bottles, containers, or jugs filled today. You can even wait until this coming weekend to work on it, but just make sure that you DO IT!
Lucky for us there is a happy ending to the story. The nicest plumber in the world, or at least in Saint George, came out and fixed my parents’ plumbing - and showers were able to be taken, and toilets were able to be used, and life was able to continue on.
I know that my mom is re-filling her 2-liter jugs even as I write (two gallons, per person, per day, for a two week period).
I want to hear your taps turning on and the filling of water jugs this weekend!
Dawn