Water-Less Wednesday

Sometime shortly after midnight, our water was turned off.  I wouldn't even have known except that our toilet went kaboom and startled me just after I had started to doze off.  I got up to make sure it was still in one piece.  It was, so I went back to bed.  I didn't think about it again until early this morning when Tim got up to get his shower and said that the water was off.  If you read my blog last year you know that this isn't that unusual for this part of the world, or the city, I don't know.  Anyway, by the time the kids dragged me out of bed I woke up, the situation still hadn't been resolved so I called Ayi and explained to her (in Chinese!!) that she didn't need to come today because I had no water.  She can't do much cleaning without that, so she got a day off.  I'm sure that made her happy.

We spent the morning lounging around, waiting for me to be able to take a shower.  By one o'clock we were still dry so I decided we would go to Happy City, with me looking pretty grungy.  Sue, who lives next door and had the same water problems, met us outside and we strolled up in rather nice weather, about five degrees.  The kids played for over two hours and burnt off a lot of energy.  There were only a couple other kids there today so they pretty much had the run of the place.  While there Anna informed me that there still was no water running in Eastern Venice but that her housing agent said it was supposed to be back on around 4:30.  At four o'clock we left Happy City, sure that by the time we walked back the taps would be flowing again.  By five we had nothing so I called Tim to have him pick up something for supper on his way home from work.  It's no problem to cook without tap water but cleaning up afterward isn't so easy.  Tim informed me then that he had to stay late so, I was going to have to make something (damn!).  As I was cooking, at 5:45, the water came back on.  I immediately flushed the toilets which were filling up (yuck!) and washed the dishes while I finished getting the food ready.  Good thing I did that because it wasn't fifteen minutes later and they shut the water off again.  Arg!   It was another few hours before it finally came back on, hopefully to stay this time.  A little notice would be greatly appreciated!

Although you probably could have made it through your day without hearing a story about us going without running water for roughly 20 hours, I couldn't let this date go by without writing something.  I'll have to wait another four years to do this again and who knows if I'll still be blogging.  I can remember a teacher of mine, I believe it was Mrs. Boudreau, telling me that her father was born on February 29th so he only got to celebrate his real birthday every four years.  How sad is that?  So, I will take this opportunity to wish all those leap year, February 29th babies, a very Happy (enough to last for the next four years) Birthday!