All About Water

Sometimes Mike and I used to talk about how it would be really handy if one of us (or both of us) had different professions.  You know, something practical that would be helpful at home.  Like if Mike was a pediatrician.  WOW, that would be convenient!  He could check for ear infections, or write us prescriptions, or reassure me about the frequency of baby poops.  Or whatever!  How nice that would be.  Or if one of us was an OB, or any kind of doctor for that matter.  Or a lawyer.  That would come in handy too.  Or a veterinarian, or a car mechanic, or a carpenter.  You know, anything that would actually help out around the house.  Civil Engineer is great, but not helpful in the pediatrician sense.  It doesn't translate to plumber.  You should have seen the plumbing job Mike attempted once in our house.  When we finally caved and called a real plumber, he asked if he could take a picture of the piping Mike did to add to his "hilarious things that I see customers do" scrapbook.  (Not kidding!)  And Astronomer just doesn't have very many practical applications AT ALL. (Did you know that the Stingray Nebula just formed about 20,000 years ago?  Fascinating!  But what am I going to do with that?)

Well, it turns out that since we've moved here, Mike's job is actually VERY handy!  We live in a desert.  It pays to understand about water!  Lots of people have lots of questions about the water here (including me!) and it's been really useful to be able to call Mike at work and ask things like "Is it ok that Lawrence is playing in the water from the in-ground sprinklers?"  You might think that this would be a silly question, but there are three kinds of water here:  sweet, raw, and tertiary.  Sweet water is the drinking water.  It is cleaned with reverse osmosis, and it tastes fine to me.  Lots of people here do not like or trust the sweet water, so they drink bottled water instead.  I personally think that the bottled water is scarier, because how do we know where THAT comes from?  Anyway, sweet water is safe water.  We all get one tap for sweet water, and that is located at the kitchen sink. 

Raw water is the water we use for everything else.  It is cleaned, but not as much as the sweet water.  It is salty, and it tastes nasty, but it won't hurt you.  Raw water is what we bathe in, do laundry in, wash dishes in, water the plants with, and wash the car with.  All the other taps in the house, including outside, are raw water.  Yes, that means that we cannot drink the water in the bathrooms!  This is VERY INCONVENIENT!  We have pitchers that we fill with sweet water at the kitchen sink and carry upstairs every day to brush our teeth with.  We always seem to be toting sweet water in pitchers, rather like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice.  And the salt builds up on everything.  Our tubs and shower curtains are COATED with layers of salt, and the spigot outside has salt crystals seemingly permanently attached.  Not to mention my hair!  (One of the things I am really looking forward to is washing my hair at home to get all this yucky, frizzy salt out of my hair!)  This water wreaks havoc on clothes, too.  I have t-shirts I have had since....I am unwilling to say!  Hmm, let's see...probably about 7th grade?  Er, no, wait, I do have one that I got in fifth grade.  The Bearden Elementary School Fifth Grade Chorus t-shirt from 1989.  Yes, I have had this shirt for 23 years (!!!) and it looked great UNTIL I put it in the washer here.  Now it is falling apart.  Literally.  A bunch of my old t-shirts are like that, and I sadly made the mistake of putting some of my dresses from when I was a baby in the washing machine, too.  The thread that holds the pieces of fabric together just dissolves.  (But the fabric is still ok, so I have been able to sew them back together.  But what a pain!)  All my tye-dye shirts from summer camp have developed huge holes, too.  OK, well, you get the point.  Raw water is really awful.

Then there's tertiary water.  This is the non-potable water that they use to irrigate.  So back to my original question....Is it ok if Lawrence plays in the sprinklers?  If my husband had any other profession, I would just guess "no" because it's irrigation and tertiary water, but ah ha!  I called up his office and asked.  How lovely!  Actually the answer is "yes" because those particular sprinklers are fed by raw water.  So it's like taking a bath!  Hooray! 

Another strange and new thing about living here and the water:  the default temperature for water here is HOT.  HOT!  It's hard to imagine, but when you turn on the water anywhere, it comes out hot.  This is because the pipes in the road get so hot every day that the water gets hot before it reaches your house.  So when we play outside in the hose, I have to check to make sure the children are not being scalded.  I keep giant blocks of ice that I make in the freezer to put in the washing machine so that the clothes can be washed on "cold" (but this does not really work because I can't make enough ice to cool down the big volume of water that fills the machine.  But I do it anyway because it makes me feel better.)  And It's getting to the point that in the evenings, I will have to donate some of my laundry ice to the kids for their bathtub because the water is too hot.  So why do we even HAVE a hot water heater?  It's because we need it in the winter.  But we also need a hot water cooler for the summer.  Do they even make such a thing? 

I'll go ask Mike.