But WHY the loss? Was somebody showering or washing a car?

Stanman May Your Light Forever Shine

So that's what the expression 'Hot to trot' means.

Please please tell me you live near a lake or a river.

Growing old disgracefully.

When I was living in Sankt-Peterburg, they would shut off the water at times, sometimes seemingly at random, for up to a month at a time. Worse, since in most places hot water came from a boiler central to several buildings, they would usually shut off one or the other (especially so, as the hot "culinary" water also supplied the radiators; yum! not!). Having the hot water shut off was frustrating, but cope-able, as one could generally boil a couple of gallons and use that to clean off or to clean dishes, floors, washbasins, etc.

MUCH worse, however, was when they shut off the cold water for a full month in the middle of summer. >.< I could fill the tub with hot water all right. Of course, if I wanted to leave my skin intact (since the water was right in the 90-95° range out of the tap; Celsius, not Fahrenheit), I had to fill the tub in the morning, and, if I was lucky, by the time I came home in the evening, it was cooled enough to get into. >.< Also, the toilet was connected, of course, to the cold water, and so I had to keep a bucket at hand to flush. >.< Lastly, I had been provided with a rather expensive, and very effective, water filtration unit. Three stages, the last of which cost nearly $200 US to replace, and which, supposedly, was filtering out most of the heavy metals endemic to the public water supply there. Right after the instruction to change the filters according to schedule and only according to schedule (no faster or slower, as both had happened and caused problems a-plenty) came the stern warning to never use it with hot water. >.< That's right, I had to take trips two or three times a week to another of the group's apartments to get water I dared use to brush my teeth or cook with or even to drink. >.<

Fortunately, I never did try to Nair myself there. Shaving was bad enough...

Edit: Also, there is no way in hell you would have gotten me to go for a dip in the Neva river. >.< It may be the fourth largest river in Europe in terms of sheer volume of water flowing through it, despite being one of the shortest, but the Soviets apparently took that as a challenge, given the number of heavy-industry plants on its shores just within city boundaries (and given the apparent attitude that pollution was something that happened to the "decadent" Westerners), not to mention the number of sewer sections that empty directly into the river (and in far too many cases just a few meters upstream from another section's community water supply intake). Altogether, NOT a healthy place to swim...

-Liz

Successor to the LToC