Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for May 31, 2022

I usually get a phone call and an email if the water is going to be off where I live.

We had this happen to us just over a week ago. Turns out a water main broke in front of our neighbor’s house and the water utility was out there digging it up. Couldn’t be bothered to inform anyone in the neighborhood that the water was about to be shut off. It was off a little over three hours.

You can drain water from the water heater for emergency use.

I have my own well, so if there’s no water, there’s also no electricity.

well pump switch turned off? circuit breaker for the well tripped? need to replace the well or well pump burned out? usually happens on a Sunday or a major holiday when the service call is doubled.

I guess we know what the theme is going to be for the next few days. Where’s the nearest place with a public toilet?

No.

Who pays the bills…Arlo or Janis?

My condo rules require that we have our sprinklers on all summer, multiple times a week. They have an agreement with the city, so we are forced to run the sprinklers even if we have a drought and there are restrictions for houses. I turned mine off during a drought once and had a board member screaming in my face because a neighbor complained that maybe my lawn would get brownish. It never did, as we get plenty of rain and don’t really even need sprinklers. I had to turn them back on. Water bills here can run $400 for 3 months, and we have no water shortages.

It is that paper bill they got coming back to haunt them!

We had this happen about 15 years ago. My wife asked me about the water bill (I kept a positive balance, so, no) and I had her look in the street. A few doors down there was a city water department truck with people doing something. Mystery solved, water back in a couple of hours.

Back in the day, either we forgot to pay because we ran out of stamps. Or maybe the check got lost in the mail!

The city is always shutting off the water here to repair leaks somewhere nearby…

apparently there are reasonably priced water tanks (like a rain barrel but larger) that can be hooked in to flush toilets in a home. I think the problem is the plumbing adjustments needed to make it work.

And when it comes back on the first pint or so will be brown.

We live in the South and had a severe drought around 3 years ago. Most of the fish ponds were drained, ban on burning (which we have sycamore trees and I tried to make “decorative patterns” around trees and shrubs with the leaves.) Some of the older folks in the area were not worried due to having wells, I knew better by seeing most of the ponds drained and neighbors not using water outside like they used to. I love the well, but would love to have city/county water for my main use.

I always figure the old polybutylene tubing I got back in 1995 blew or the even older PVC I ran back in 1981 blew. Or the fire department is fighting a fire down the road.

I always assume it is my fault too, Arlo. And according to Janis, it is his fault as well.

Granted, water is a huge problem in Africa and some other parts of the world. And the US does waste a lot of it on lawns, etc. But I don’t know if I’d call flushing toilets to be a waste. The parts of the world without toilets that flush and sewer treatment centers to process the waste have a heck of a lot of problems from using pit toilets, bushes, drainage ditches, or what have you.

California has been mentioned up thread. Look up how much food is produced in California, especially the San Juaquin Valley. It’s stunning and it’s in danger from lack of water. Unbelievable as it sounds, due to pumping out the aquifer, the land is sinking and sea water is creeping in. This could eventually destroy it as a food producing area. There is a constant battle over how much water to give the farmers as opposed to how much goes to the cities and sadly the cities tend to win. Cities, in this situation, are parasites as opposed to farms that produce food. The Colorado River is so over used, it is literally being drained dry. Look up Lake Powell if you want a scary statistic.

So, one minute out of a 1000 you don’t have water and it’s a crisis? Take no responsibility, blame someone else!!!

That looks like an elementary school restroom sink to me. :)

About a decade ago we had bed bugs in our house. (No, wait – there is a connection, I promise.)

We spent around 1/3 of a year’s income on the treatment of the house, stuff we tossed as it was hard too hard to deal with and so on.

While we had not traveled before getting the bedbugs for about a year we did not want to take any chances in the future. But we like to travel – mostly small weekend or a week long trips along the upper half of the eastern US coast Mass to VA) and did not want to give it up as husband had recently quit his job/retired and had been looking forward to going to the places we enjoy. So we bought a Class B RV (Chevy van conversion). It is VERY cozy.

We were about to get ready to go on a trip when Hurricane Sandy came along. We decided we go ahead in putting water and some food in it – if the hurricane turned out to be nothing we would be ready to go, and if not – well, we would have 30 gallons of clean water in and if we had to leave we would be set. (She hit here bad – but where we are we are not hit badly and only lost electricity for 4 days.) A day or after she hit we did go in, put up the antenna, and watch some TV to see what was on the news and for diversion – husband figured out we could watch 3 hours of TV on a half gallon of gasoline using the RV’s batteries for 2

So now whenever a bad storm is coming and it is in RV season (so the water system is not winterized) we fill the RV tanks with water to be ready just in case.