Roughing It

One personality trait of mine that differs greatly from my husband's is the enjoyment of doing things differently. I love to try new foods, have new experiences, mix things up a little! Brian, on the other hand, is perfectly content to eat peanut butter and jelly every day for lunch.

One way in which this trait manifests itself is that I love power outages. Suddenly, the everyday way of living life - flipping on a switch, cooking a soup, vaccuming the floor - has to be changed. Sometimes, the same task is accomplished a different way, and we pull out candles and flashlights. Other tasks just get set aside for the time being, and we ignore the vacuuming to play a board game. Now, I'm not sure if this enjoyment would continue if we lived in Kamchatka and our fuel supply was shut off for the winter; but the few and far between times that service is interrupted, I love it!

This week, though, we are roughing it in a new way. Last night, the pipe that supplies Boston's water broke, and approximately two million people were left without potable water.

Now this is an interesting situation! I have lived with no water before, as my parents used to have a low-yield, electric pumped well. But here we have no shortage of water. It's just that the water is coming from a reservoir I have seen the ducks swimming in, and thus it's not suitable to drink or with which to sanitize dishes and hands. So we are boiling water and queuing to buy bottled water.

I'm sorry for those of you out there with personalities like Brian's - who would rather have life be essentially the same from day to day.

That said, what fun! I wash the dishes in our house (at least, during the school year), so I am enjoying this challenge of washing and rinsing with boiled water. The trickiest part? Let me just say, having water flow out of a faucet suspended above a dish is a very handy thing!