When water, when?
We had rain yesterday. All day.
Then all night.
Not this morning though, or this noon, or this afternoon. I think the sky ran out. It can happen.
Things run out if you use too much.
Like the other water. That too. The stuff in the pipes. That ran out, though I don't know the exact true cause.
As a believer in cause and effect, if I see the effect, such as no water coming out of the tap, then you betcha, right away I'm guessing there is a cause. And sometimes — maybe a lot of times (I'm not absolutely clear on this part, but maybe a lot of times) — you never find out what that cause is, and you have more important things to deal with at the moment anyway, so you forget about Why? and begin thinking about What the eff do I do now?
Like today.
My fallback What now? position notched over to drinking water from the toilet tank. I mean, if there was no alternative. If there wasn't a better alternative, then that would have been it.
Scoop, boil, drink. Like that, with the boiling part providing the KO punch to any residual cootie-bugs hiding down there in the water, but it would have been a little hard to swallow nevertheless. Especially tomorrow, after having gone to bed bathless, with unwashed hands, and being generally pissed on principle. You can imagine, right?
But there were alternatives, two that I could think of, and they went like this...
- Take my knapsack and hoof it the better part of a mile over to the supermarket, and buy bottled water there. If the place was open, which it might not have been, because this is the second-to-last day of Carnival, and almost everything is closed because when they have a party here, they close everything up tight and leave town. All that's left behind is hungry, confused tourists wondering where the party is, and where to find food.
- Or, option two, my preferred choice, which was to go over to the WH Cafe, buy lunch, and see if I could cadge two Platypus 2.5 L bladders full of water, or as a last resort, buy it from them. If their water was working. And if they were shut off too, then I couldn't get water and also couldn't get anything to eat, because they would have been closed — can't run a cafe without you have water, you know — but then there was still SuperFutzi and the possibility of bottled water. If they had been open, which was uncertain, but definitely a second option.
Yeah, Life In Paradise, Episode XII: The day of WTF.
Now for the happy ending. I got eats at WH Cafe and tanked up on water too, so's I be OK now.
On the way to the WH Cafe, wouldn't you know, down by the corner of where I live, almost right outside, there were three guys in the street with a slab of pavement pried up, and one guy had a long iron bar and was leaning into that bar, which was stuck in the spokes of a large wheel, which I'm guessing was the underground faucet for here. And it looked like he was turning that faucet.
Anyway, after lunch the guys were gone and the water was on.
Now I only have to wait a day or so until the pipes get properly flushed before daring to drink the water, due to backflow or back-sucking or whatever it's called, which contaminates water supplies when this happens, but meanwhile I have five liters of WH Cafe's Clear And Sparkly Best sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting to duke it out with my thirst, whenever that may come along again.
So, once again, could be worse, you know?
I don't want to be speculating, but maybe that's why they call it paradise here.