Water Woes

My yard is covered in melting snow. Water is dripping off of the roof. Tiny rivers are running down the street. Winter (dreaming of spring) in Connecticut is here. That means water!

It's easy to forget just how serious our global water situation is. Dire would be a great word. Australia is on fire. Kids are dying of thirst and dysentery in Africa. Water shortages are abound. We each need to do our part to lessen our fresh water usage.

I was dreaming in green last Christmas. As all good little Gruppies do, I wrote a letter to Santa. In my letter I asked Santa for solar roof panels and a low-flow shower head with a pause button. (You know, for those soapy moments when you really aren't standing under the shower and all of that clean water is just falling down the drain.) Seeing that I had been extra good I thought that I was sure to score with my gifts.

Well, the solar panels must not have fit in Santa's sack, because the Waterpik showerhead was one of my only gifts under the tree. Maybe I wasn't as good as I thought...


On Christmas day I immediately ran to the shower and installed my new low-flow showerhead (because I'm crafty like that) and proceeded to take a shower. I'll keep this all PG, but when it was time to soap up I slid the pause button only to have the water slow. As all five year olds know, pause means stop. Like stop completely. Who are these Waterpik packaging writers who believe that pause means "just slow down a little"?

In addition to the annoying false advertising, the water stream was amazingly narrow. I found myself talking longer showers just to make-up for the lack of water covering my body. I began to think that my fancy new low-flow shower head was costing me money and wasting more water.

Long story short, I paused my dream of easily conserving water in the shower for now. When I soap up, I turn off the water completely. It's a pain, but it will have to do. As for the new shower head, I did what any frugal parent would do...made the kids use it.