Dec 07 2010
Water World
You know your life is thrilling when you’re excited about getting a new garden hose. And a rain gauge.
The old hose was suffering from leakage, including the rotted out area where it connected to the faucet. Using the hose was much like revisiting the garden sprinkler of my youth, but it was much less delightful when fully clothed and with temperatures hovering around the freezing mark (you will find this is true of many things).
Buying a new hose was on my To Do list for a while, so it was especially satisfying to finally get one.
I unscrewed the old one and dragged it to the pile of things and stuff which Mark keeps promising to haul to the dump for me. It was surprisingly heavy. Also, I hope we really do get the things and stuff hauled to the dump before Paul gets here. Everyone likes to act as if they live much more elegantly than they really do when they have company.
I attached the new one and turned on the faucet. Alas, it still squirted me. Hmmm. I took it off and put it on again (the hose equivalent of rebooting your computer) and tried to tighten it again, but the results were still much wetter than I wanted. Rob has one more thing on his endless To Do list. Little does he know!
More successful was the rain gauge. I wanted to get one so I could complain accurately about all the rain we get. For once, it turns out that I am not wrong. Hooterville got fully six inches more rain than the big town with the Safeway in the same time period.
As you can see, the rain gauge only goes up to five inches, so it will give me the opportunity to practice my rusty math. I installed the rain gauge on the balcony, making sure that there were no trees nearby to block precipitation. The other night, we got about .75 inches. According to last week’s paper, Hooterville had received 17.3 inches for the season to date, so that brings me up to 18.05 if my math is correct.
Given that it’s supposed to rain for the rest of the week, I should get lots of practice in basic math skills. And I won’t need the hose.