Procrastination = Do-Gooding

I just wrote out a list of about a million things I have to do in the next couple of days and blogging is nowhere to be found on it. As I started to become paralyzed with incomprehension of how I'm going to get everything done, I made the decision to ignore the whole thing and logged on to this bastion of procrastination. What could be more important than this issue, anyway. Nothing on that list, that's for sure. (Except maybe the one about buying my son more socks. He really need socks desperately!!!)

One of my friends sent me another clip about dirty water -- lucky for you... because today's entry was GOING to be about how I soaked a big soup pot without turning on the faucet once. Admit it, you would have loved it...

Now, you know the situation is not good when Erin Brokovich shows up in your backyard at a hearing about the water in question. Here is a clip from the Oakland Tribune article:

The poison in question is hexavalent chromium, also called hex chrome or chromium six, given notoriety in the film bearing Brockovich's name. Hex chrome is a carcinogen long known to cause cancer through inhalation but only recently recognized by the federal government as dangerous to drink. Before there was controversy over whether stomach acids converted the chemical into a related, nonpoisonous nutrient, researcher Gina Solomon said...

More than 30 million Californians in 500 communities are at risk of being exposed to far higher rates, Brockovich said.

The most at-risk areas in the state are near Los Angeles and along the Central Valley, Solomon said. The Bay Area is generally safer, though hex chrome has been found in dangerous levels further down the Highway 101 corridor nearer San Jose, she said...

I thought Julia Roberts fixed all of this! Now, I know that stories like this are what cause people to buy bottled water. But here's what the NRDC found:

However, our investigation has found that potentially harmful chemical contaminants are indeed sometimes found in some brands of bottled water. (The box at the end of this chapter highlights a particularly troubling example.) NRDC’s testing of more than 1,000 bottles of water (for about half of FDA-regulated contaminants; see the Technical Report [print report only]), found that at least one sample of 26 of the 103 bottled water brands tested (25 percent) contained chemical contaminants at levels above the strict, health-protective limits of California, the bottled water industry code, or other states^[3a] (23 waters, or 22 percent, had at least one sample that violated enforceable state limits).

So, what the...? What are we supposed to do? Well, I turned to the site for the documentary Flow, which is the movie that sparked this crazy new fear of mine about the future of water. And they have a whole page dedicated to what you can do. Click here to find something that fits into your schedule and personal beliefs. Hey all I was doing was procrastinating and I ended up signing a petition asking the UN to declare water a human right (it literally took a minute). Nothing on my list was THAT important!