A Weekend Without Water

Well, everyone told me it would happen but I chose to ignore them, chose to believe it absolutely couldn't be true, but I was wrong... so very wrong.

This story begins when M. and I turned on our faucet Saturday and were greeted by this:

Just great water pressure, right? To make it worse, the kitchen sink (where this photo was taken with my iPad) was the only place in the house we had any water at all. Knowing it was only a matter of time before we lost water altogether, we promptly filled up every large bowl and pan we had in our home until our kitchen counters looked like this:

We also filled up our distiller, thanked our lucky stars that we had five filled pitchers of water already distilled in the fridge, and ran to the store to buy about 30 bottles of water to keep in reserve.

By Saturday afternoon we were completely without water. With the immediate problem of drinking water addressed, we turned to our next problem that is caused by drinking said water: flushing the toilet.

Luckily, M. and I moved out to Scammon with all of our stuff in 18 gallon Rubbermaid totes. I headed upstairs to grab a few and M. headed outside with a shovel. The next 4 or 5 hours was spent melting snow on our stove and in our oven so that we had totes filled with water to flush the toilet.

Finally, Sunday afternoon caught up with me. To understand what happens next I have to confess something to all of you: I am obsessive about showering, and more specifically about washing my hair. When my hair is not clean I get VERY cranky and moody. By Sunday afternoon I hadn't showered in 48 hours and I was downright Grinch-like. So I grabbed our handy shovel and filled our sink with snow.

I spent the next hour or so melting snow and heating it to a tolerable temperature and M. and I proceeded to wash our hair and faces in the sink. With snow-water. Brrrrr....

I am happy to report that the water is back on, we were worried for a bit that we would be going weeks or even months without water as other villages in our area have done.

I can also honestly call Rosemary Clooney a liar: no one wants to wast their face, their hands, their hair with snow. It's not a great experience, no matter how much you like snow.