wet gold

David and I spent the morning getting water to come to our house. What did you do?

What? Water from the city, you ask?

Oh no no no, don't be silly. Just because we have some tubes and a water meter doesn't mean we have the city water. No. Let's remember that it took 3 years to get those installed, so actually getting the city water to run through them and into the house...well, who can say how long that will take.

No no, David and I spent the morning in active guerrilla style combat finding who's taking the water and how we can get in on the action. Maybe we were more like 007 and Q - doing some serious espionage. Actually, it felt more like we were Laurel and Hardy or Lucy and Ricky.

Here's what happened...

About a week ago a neighbor, let's just call him Pier Paolo, accused us of disconnecting his tubes and taking his water. Water, which Pier Paolo also claims we don't have the right to. (Do you sometimes, while reading my blog, experience a certain "Groundhog's Day" effect?) Let's not dwell on the lies of disillusional neighbors. I'm sure he means well...um, well probably not but anyway...

One thing led to another and my husband was shouting vaffanculo at Pier Paolo.

For those of you whose italian isn't so good, vaffanculo literally means go make yourself a butt...or something really intelligent like that. It's obviously an expression that is reserved for those rare (or not so rare) times when, by pure reflex, your left arm whacks your right arm right at the inside elbow causing the right forearm and hand to gesticulate aggression to another person or party. If you are having a tough time imagining it, go here.

Now THAT'S integrating yourself in the local culture! Well done, Honey.

So when the situation calmed down, and Pier Paolo stopped shouting "David, you can't send me in the butt!", we all apologize to each other and decide to play nice. Pier Paolo left the mountain with his tube reconnected.

A few days later we notice that there is only a trickle of water entering our vasca and that my bath water has a greenish-yellow tinge and smelled of sulfur. Lovely. Now, I'm not accusing Pier Paolo here, but we think Pier Paolo did it.

Actually, we don't think he did it on purpose but rather he was trying to clean the tube of built-up crud that was causing none of us to have water, which promptly sent said crud into our vasca. So this morning we emptied the vasca.



And David washed it with some bleach. (I suppose my next load of laundry should be whites)



Then we decided it was a good idea to find more than a trickle to fill it back up. We tried to go at the usual spring only to find, that, alas, that font is dry (or should I say, nothing more than a trickle).

This is where the espionage comes in, or the guerrilla tactics, I should say...

I won't go into all the ugly and wet details of how and where we found water (because you just don't know who is reading this and then I'd have to kill you all) but we did. We also connected Pier Paolo...you know, just to be neighborly.

Wet gold. We got it. Do you?