Thursday, June 25, 2009

Did I Ever Tell You I Actually Hate Summer?

My neighbor has been out of town. She needs me to water the parts of her garden she's still trying to keep alive. (She's back now, but has guests, so she still wants me to water.) But she's on a well. And we're in a drought. Which means that I can get maybe twenty-five minutes of water out of her hose at a time. (There's this nifty thing people do here called 'the tank'. As in, 'just wait for the tank to fill up'. It's a big (or small, depends on what you can afford) tank next to the strange device called a 'pump house', which houses not the pump but all the mysterious things that control the flow of water from the pump. The pump itself is at the bottom of the well. 'The tank', as it is called, works as a resevoir. Instead of directing water directly from the well to the house, water goes from the well to the tank to the house. So when we run out of water, the well itself is not dry, the tank is. This is still not good, but much less disastrous than running your well dry and burning out the pump. Burning out the pump, in technical terms, is called 'a very bad thing'. I said the pump is at the bottom of the well, right? Well, just think about what replacing a useless pump entails, with no water in the house while the men stand around staring at a small hole in the ground and grumble blue things under their breath. The tank is basically a buffer system, meant to stem the flow of blue things in the air. It's also a good indicator of when you should start kicking the family of ten out of your house.)
So anyway, we're in a drought and I can't water everything at once. So I'm going over there more than once a day. Three and four times a day, actually. Which means that I am in a permanent state of sticky hotness, all day long. It's a big garden.
The only bright side to all this is that I'm getting paid to be hot and sticky.

2 comments:

  1. Ugh. Can you spare any of that water to mist yourself to keep cooler while watering? Whatever she's paying you, I doubt it's enough to be out in this heat!!

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  2. would that it be posable to capture said blue things and add to the colective oral paint-set!
    but then again maybe not.

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