Post by Steve on Jan 31, 2020 16:12:38 GMT -8
Water? Sure. I'm talking about water to drink. Maybe I am too picky, but my tap water in Placerville always tastes like it came from a swimming pool! I bit too much essence of chlorine, I can't stand it. So for too many years I have been buying Crystal Geyser bottled water. Small bottles for daily drinking, a 2.5 gallon jug for cooking. Tap water for boiling an egg, bottled water for everything else. And with the last few years of news about the environmental; hit fro plastics, the Garbage Patch as big as Texas the floats around in the Pacific, and plastic trash floating up to beaches of remote pristine islands, not to mention the sea critters injecting plastic bags that look like jellyfish, or the micro pellets that are now found by the millions in a cubic foot of sea water, I hated taking all my empty bottles back to recycle. But I kept buying bottled water.
A strangce thing to mention is that because my vision is so bad, I go grocery shopping but I only define what I buy on a list. I do not handle the check out, candy handles my payment (with my credit card! Can't convince her to spend her money!) so I know the total, that's pretty much it,
Then one day she also wanted the same water I was buying. She bought a case of 24 and a 2,5 gallon jug. The cost of the water plus the deposits was about $8.00 or more. When I heard that, it hit me like never before. Look how much I am spending on what most people take for granted when they turn on the faucet! I should not be spending $15+ each month on water.
I discovered a Walmart Drink Powder to add flavor to water. It is curiously named an energy drink, but it is inexpensive, less than $1.80 for a box of 20, each flavors a 16 oz. glass of tap water. Note I said glass, not bottle. So now I can add a packet too my tap water and enjoy a tasty drink without any hint of swimmi9ng pool! And no accumulating empties, so no extra trio to the recycle truck. What a great way to save. Why did this take me so long?
So maybe yiou can wean yourself from plastic water bottles? Then look at the other ways you use one-time plastics. I'm working on it, trying to do a tiny part of making something better.
Of course maybe I am just too sensitive. But I do find it odd that San Francisco gets its tap water from Hatch Hatchy* and it is reported to taste great. We get our water from the High Sierra snowpack 75 miles away! I wonder what they do to it before it gets to me?
* There is an excellent program on PBS NOVA that tells the history of getting water to San Francisco. It is only 39 minutes, and I have signed up for PBS Passport to have access to it, so when I can. Maybe you have access now to Water from the Wilderness. I promise it is really interesting to see how the new little town of San Francisco, established on a sandy peninsula with no source of fresh water, handled getting a supply from other places. For the late 1800s, it was pretty well done.
A strangce thing to mention is that because my vision is so bad, I go grocery shopping but I only define what I buy on a list. I do not handle the check out, candy handles my payment (with my credit card! Can't convince her to spend her money!) so I know the total, that's pretty much it,
Then one day she also wanted the same water I was buying. She bought a case of 24 and a 2,5 gallon jug. The cost of the water plus the deposits was about $8.00 or more. When I heard that, it hit me like never before. Look how much I am spending on what most people take for granted when they turn on the faucet! I should not be spending $15+ each month on water.
I discovered a Walmart Drink Powder to add flavor to water. It is curiously named an energy drink, but it is inexpensive, less than $1.80 for a box of 20, each flavors a 16 oz. glass of tap water. Note I said glass, not bottle. So now I can add a packet too my tap water and enjoy a tasty drink without any hint of swimmi9ng pool! And no accumulating empties, so no extra trio to the recycle truck. What a great way to save. Why did this take me so long?
So maybe yiou can wean yourself from plastic water bottles? Then look at the other ways you use one-time plastics. I'm working on it, trying to do a tiny part of making something better.
Of course maybe I am just too sensitive. But I do find it odd that San Francisco gets its tap water from Hatch Hatchy* and it is reported to taste great. We get our water from the High Sierra snowpack 75 miles away! I wonder what they do to it before it gets to me?
* There is an excellent program on PBS NOVA that tells the history of getting water to San Francisco. It is only 39 minutes, and I have signed up for PBS Passport to have access to it, so when I can. Maybe you have access now to Water from the Wilderness. I promise it is really interesting to see how the new little town of San Francisco, established on a sandy peninsula with no source of fresh water, handled getting a supply from other places. For the late 1800s, it was pretty well done.
