Water World
The apartment saga revolves around water; hot,cold,lacking.
We have never had hot water from the tap, and never really had water pressure : until yesterday.
And yesterday, after our Dodge City style bucket baths, we had no water. Whatsoever. At all.
We returned from the morning at the baby house; no water. As long as we did not want to cook or bathe, this was ok: we purchase drinking water in 5L jugs. The refrigerator does a great job and a drink of cold clear water is terrific.
We increased our drinking pleasure by spending almost the equivalent of 3 USD on new mugs - the doll sized amenities in the apartment are, in general, just fine but drinking out of dixie-cup sized cups and mugs is getting tedious.
But no water from the taps. Not the kitchen tap, not the bathroom sink tap, not the bathroom tub tap. The toilet kept working but we didn't want to know any details of that.
The water was on in time for "dinner" last night. For the first time, we actually purchased vegetables and boullion and made up a soup of potatoes, onions, garlic and tomatoes. Mitch got out the Langenscheidt's dictionary and found out that, in our explorations of Karaganda's own brand of beer, we'd tried the one with the white label and made a mistake. No alcohol. No more white label Karaganda brand beer. It was like hoppy water and for a while we considered adding it to the stewing soup. The potatoes had purple streaks inside. Considering that there were once 4000 varieties of potato in the world, and that other people seemed to be buying these potatoes en masse, we figure it must be fine. We balanced out the white label stuff with "Khan" vodka, which led us to the word "potentiate" which means to leverage or catalyze something else. We decided, with no actual scientific basis, that the nonalcoholic stuff combines with the vodka to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Greater as in tail-kicking ability. We used the dixie-cup sized cups for the Khan and barely covered the bottom of them. Then we prudently put the Khan back into the refrigerator to molest us no more last night.
The soup stayed hot (we are not at 7000' altitude, obviously) and was good with fresh bread. We hadfound "sharp chili" in the supermarket - red chile with salt crystals in it - and occasionally added that to vary a spoonful.
Sometime during the night, I made a visit to the loo. Ordinary. But then the extraordinary happened. Water GUSHED out of the sink tap. And it was hot.
I considered waking Mitch to have him come see. You cannot imagine what a big event this would be, to have hot running water - we could actually use the shower handle and we could maybe even run the clothes washer. But the temperature settled back to just off-cold and my dilemma at whether to wake Mitch passed.
Now we have high volume brown water with flakes in it. We surmise that the outage yesterday was for switching the water system to winter state, and that the pipes haven't been used in a while and so they need to be cleaned out. This also explains why the inside of the electric kettle is brown, even though I wondered why anyone would be brewing tea inside it. Now I will go discourse with Mitch on whether shampooing my hair with the new water supply will be an improvement or not over my hair's current state. I am joking. We just find things to talk about to fill the time, since we don't understand the tv at all and there is only one internet connection. We have stayed quite clean and happy with the bucket method. It is the clothes washer that I long for.
So I hear Mitch boiling up a kettle and will now go see what is going on there (much like my daughter and her walker-colleagues when they investigate what is going on in their room) and see if he is making more tea or if he is boiling up for washing if we have no hot tap water...this life is not bad at all, I tell you!
More later...
Bobi, Aigerim, Mitch and The Khan
We have never had hot water from the tap, and never really had water pressure : until yesterday.
And yesterday, after our Dodge City style bucket baths, we had no water. Whatsoever. At all.
We returned from the morning at the baby house; no water. As long as we did not want to cook or bathe, this was ok: we purchase drinking water in 5L jugs. The refrigerator does a great job and a drink of cold clear water is terrific.
We increased our drinking pleasure by spending almost the equivalent of 3 USD on new mugs - the doll sized amenities in the apartment are, in general, just fine but drinking out of dixie-cup sized cups and mugs is getting tedious.
But no water from the taps. Not the kitchen tap, not the bathroom sink tap, not the bathroom tub tap. The toilet kept working but we didn't want to know any details of that.
The water was on in time for "dinner" last night. For the first time, we actually purchased vegetables and boullion and made up a soup of potatoes, onions, garlic and tomatoes. Mitch got out the Langenscheidt's dictionary and found out that, in our explorations of Karaganda's own brand of beer, we'd tried the one with the white label and made a mistake. No alcohol. No more white label Karaganda brand beer. It was like hoppy water and for a while we considered adding it to the stewing soup. The potatoes had purple streaks inside. Considering that there were once 4000 varieties of potato in the world, and that other people seemed to be buying these potatoes en masse, we figure it must be fine. We balanced out the white label stuff with "Khan" vodka, which led us to the word "potentiate" which means to leverage or catalyze something else. We decided, with no actual scientific basis, that the nonalcoholic stuff combines with the vodka to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Greater as in tail-kicking ability. We used the dixie-cup sized cups for the Khan and barely covered the bottom of them. Then we prudently put the Khan back into the refrigerator to molest us no more last night.
The soup stayed hot (we are not at 7000' altitude, obviously) and was good with fresh bread. We hadfound "sharp chili" in the supermarket - red chile with salt crystals in it - and occasionally added that to vary a spoonful.
Sometime during the night, I made a visit to the loo. Ordinary. But then the extraordinary happened. Water GUSHED out of the sink tap. And it was hot.
I considered waking Mitch to have him come see. You cannot imagine what a big event this would be, to have hot running water - we could actually use the shower handle and we could maybe even run the clothes washer. But the temperature settled back to just off-cold and my dilemma at whether to wake Mitch passed.
Now we have high volume brown water with flakes in it. We surmise that the outage yesterday was for switching the water system to winter state, and that the pipes haven't been used in a while and so they need to be cleaned out. This also explains why the inside of the electric kettle is brown, even though I wondered why anyone would be brewing tea inside it. Now I will go discourse with Mitch on whether shampooing my hair with the new water supply will be an improvement or not over my hair's current state. I am joking. We just find things to talk about to fill the time, since we don't understand the tv at all and there is only one internet connection. We have stayed quite clean and happy with the bucket method. It is the clothes washer that I long for.
So I hear Mitch boiling up a kettle and will now go see what is going on there (much like my daughter and her walker-colleagues when they investigate what is going on in their room) and see if he is making more tea or if he is boiling up for washing if we have no hot tap water...this life is not bad at all, I tell you!
More later...
Bobi, Aigerim, Mitch and The Khan
posted by Bobi @ 7:46 PM
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