Skip to main content

I lived under a boil water order--here's what happened

Last Thursday, the sidewalk by a step-cracked building lifted up off the ground when the water main under it broke.

 I turned on my faucet and got nothing. All the water was running down the streets a few miles away, waist deep in some places. 


Water main break, March 27, 2025. Source: Indianapolis Fire Department. 

Later that day, after fixing the main, the water company issued a boil-water advisory for the next two days. If you wanted to drink it, cook with it, or wash your dishes in it, it had to be boiled. 

As usual, I had a sink full of dirty dishes. No problem, I thought--I'll boil water in my canner. But it takes a long time to bring so much water to boil, then it has to cool down enough to put your hands in it. Finally, around 10 PM, I was ready to wash the dishes. I soaped up the first dish...then realized I had nothing to rinse it with. I put some water I'd bought at the store in the canner. It had to do for the whole batch. 

I also got some dry shampoo. I'd never used it before and didn't realize it was mostly butane. Butane? Are you supposed to put butane in your hair? I always get water in my eyes when I wash my hair, and, not wanting to risk another eye infection, cleaned my hair with butane. Twice. 

When it was time to brush my teeth and wash my face, I took a bowl of bottled water to the bathroom. I thought I'd wash my face first. I lathered up my face, then realized that once I rinsed it, I'd have soapy water to brush my teeth with. So I brushed my teeth, rinsed the toothbrush, then rinsed the soap off my face. Who'd have thought that using a wash basin with limited water was like 4D chess?

I thought about washing my hands. I don't trust hand sanitizer to get all the crud off my hands, and I don't trust soap to sanitize my hands. But since the water was clean enough to bathe and wash your clothes in (as the water company said), the tap water couldn't be that bad. I washed my hands as usual, then used hand sanitizer.

Not wanting to wash any more dishes, I went out for lunch the next day and fed my dog some canned fish.

Just as I got everything figured out, the water company ended the boil water advisory. 

I never realized what a convenience it is to have sanitary tap water.

Comments

Lowcarb team member said…
We take so much for granted until it is taken away from us ...

All the best Jan
April 01, 2025
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh.  Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good.  I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds.  Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...
2 comments
Read more

Infrared Light: How much is too much?

It's the sort of thing that sounds like quackery: a pad with tiny red LED lights and a few buttons that's supposed to help you heal, just $30 on ebay. I never would have bought it, but Dr. Davis gave a presentation on infrared light late in 2024. Since I was still suffering from achilles tendonitis after being floxxed , I decided to try it.  I wrapped it around my ankle and turned it on the lowest setting for five minutes. Nothing seemed to happen, but the next day, I wrote,  My tendonitis is GONE after one 5-minute treatment! I didn’t feel it doing anything, I didn’t think it was going to do anything (at least not that quickly), but for the first time in several months, I’ve gotten out of bed and started walking normally and didn’t have any pain reaching with my left arm. I'd been shuffling around like an 80-year-old woman after getting out of bed in the morning. The tendonitis returned, but it was improved. I eventually had physical therapy for it, and now, apart from a l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...
6 comments
Read more

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...
Post a Comment
Read more

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE
Post a Comment
Read more