BATH TIME!

I suppose you expected to see a bathtub when you saw the heading on today's blog. Well, in a sense you ARE seeing it, although until the rain starts pouring down, you'll just have to imagine it.

My mother always said there is more than one way to skin a cat (a horrible saying, if I do say so myself.) But in this case, the adage is illustrative of what we do since we no longer have any outside water available to us via a faucet for things like watering our flowers, our lawn, cleaning off the porch or washing the dust off the plastic porch furniture. Rain is due any minute, so I quickly placed the furniture in our front yard, where Mother Nature hopefully will do a good job on it.

In spite of having had such a rainy winter California still is in drought mode. Eighteen months or so ago the distributor of water to this part of Riverside County told our apartment complex that if water usage wasn't cut down to a certain level a large monthly fine would be levied. Now we have about 90 some buildings on the property and about 1200 residents. Water is one of the utilities that is included in our monthly rent. We have laundromats scattered throughout the complex and a golf course that must be kept green, so managment, knowing that there was no way to enforce residents to cut back on water voluntarily, told us then that in lieu of raising rents to cover the fine for using too much water, they were going cut down the usage by capping all the outside water faucets.

People didn't like the plan, but they had options: 1) move (some did); 2) let their plants die (some did); 3) buy hoses and run them from the kitchen faucet through the house and into the yards (some did); and carry buckets of water from the bathtub faucet to the yard to save the plants (we did.) Because we have a street close by our apartment which tends to create lots of dirt on our porch furniture, during the winter we place the chairs out own the lawn when it rains to let nature do its thing. At the end of the first half hour of rain, we turn the furniture upside down to wash away the spiders that like to make their homes inside the chair legs. After an hour's rain, we bring them onto the porch and wipe them down with a damp cloth. Voila' We've skinned a cat! Our only other option besides letting them stay dirty is carting everything into the bathtub to clean it there.

We've been watching for the rain since late last evening, after the big moon show. Nothing has happened yet, although I watched a bit of the Los Angeles Marathon this morning on TV and it has been and still is raining there. Jerry is on the golf course in San Bernardino, and since he hasn't come home yet (he had a 6:50 a.m. tee time) it must not be raining there yet. But it is getting steadily darker and gloomier, so I suspect we don't have to wait much longer.

Southern Californians don't really do well in the rain; we tend to tuck ourselves away where it is warm and stay off the roads. If we do get on the roads we tend to drive too fast and have more accidents than usual. One of the biggest surprises we had when we moved to Istanbul was to learn that the rest of the world just goes on about their business when it rain. Here, people cancel plans, skip meetings, and gripe about the rain, even when we need it so badly. Jer should be home around noon, and we have to be back in San Bernardino at a ostomy support group at 2 p.m. I can assure you that only half the usual attendees will be there today.

Hmmmm. I just looked out the window and it seems to be clearing up a bit. I hope I don't have to lug dirty furniture back onto the porch.