Bad Blogger

I know, I know, I went to bed without blogging last night. I was so tired! But believe me, I faced sufficient punishment this morning when I did my daily water reading this morning. Girl Googled "Water Shortage" instead of "Water Conservation." Boy, that made me wish there was something stronger in my cup than coffee. Here are some lines that are floating around in my head (hey, why should I be the only one losing sleep tonight!). This is from http://water.org/facts:

• An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the typical person living in a developing country slum uses in a whole day. (1)
• 884 million people, lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people. (5)
• The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. (1)
• Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. (12)
• The daily requirement for sanitation, bathing, and cooking needs, as well as for assuring survival, is about 13.2 gallons per person. (3)

Say what? I'm sorry, back up... The daily requirement per person for assuring survival is only 13.2 gallons? Okay, this is a good time to tell you what my water calculator told me the other day when I was too tired and grumpy to talk about it. With all of my water saving strategies, it told me that I am using around 60 gallons of water. 60! Even if I cut that in half, that is way more than 13.2. Can you live with that? Because I can't.

Here's a simple thing that I'm going to do. I haven't yet read this, but I'm sure that this has been thought of by all of the experts. I live in a rented apartment and I can't afford to go out and replace every faucet and toilet with the low-flow alternative. But who says I have to turn on the faucet full blast every time I wash my hands or wash a pot. Do I really need that sucker to wet my toothbrush with the pressure of a 4-alarm fire hose? No. I don't. No one does. It makes sense that someone's using 6 gallons of water to wash bagel crumbs off their breakfast dish if the sink is on full blast. But it's totally unnecessary. So, now, when the sink goes on, the habit I'm going to form is lowering it to half of the pressure if it has to run continuously.

The other thing that I've started and am probably going to apply to more daily activities is plugging the drain. My son has a mass of curly hair on his head and every morning it takes a very wet comb to tame it. Usually I turn on the faucet every time I have to wet it again, but now I just plug the sink and dip the comb. I don't see why I can't do that with my toothbrush and I know my husband can do that with his razor when he's shaving.

Now that water shortage is my new Google search, I have to say, I'm a little nervous about what I'm going to learn. I can't look at my kid and know that this is the world I'm going to hand him. And I know that I can't live with accepting that kids his age are not entitled to the same safe water that he is. I can't. These are such stupid little ways of dealing with this, but I just have to start with myself and my family first. But I feel this issue starting to land in the pit of my stomach.