Muddy Waters: Day 4 of Drinking Vancouver’s Tap Water

posted at 1:51 pm
on Nov. 24, 2006

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Vancouver Water: Day 3

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Day 5 of Drinking the Water

Yesterday was a good day.  The E.Coli alarm was a false one, so I’m still sticking with Vancouver’s tap H-2-OhNo.

Well, almost.  I took a short break from my waterfast to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner at Justin and Sue’s place.  Wine tastes way better than silty water—I bet that’s been true since the Middle Ages.

The food was great, including some variations on traditional fare, like gingered carrots, apple in the sweet potatoes, almonds on the green beans, and the turkey itself was excellent.  She also did the cranberries-from-a-can thing, which would have made my Dad smile.  I don’t really like cranberries either way, though I put some on my bun as jelly and that was tasty.

J&S have a young child, and they had invited over two other couples with kids, so the age distribution was 17 months, 19 months and 20 months, I think.  Plus a newborn still with the squishy bobble head thing going on.  The mobile kids all seemed to like chasing the cat around, when they weren’t rubbing grapes into the carpet.

Oh, and one of the women was pregnant. The other was breast feeding.  And the building’s buzzer was broken, necessitating a lot of trips up and down the elevator.  How Sue managed to cook dinner in the ensuing chaos without anything catching fire amazes me.  I forget things in the oven all the time, and that’s when I’m so hungry I’m standing there watching the pizza, not when two kids are screaming about who can play an electronic piano louder.

The recurring theme at dinner was, “Doesn’t this make you want to have kids, ha ha!” (or during the worst stretches “I bet this makes you not want to have kids! ha ha!") To which I was very polite and said, “Ha ha, indeed!” But the truth is—actually, no, it doesn’t.

Darren started a wiki recently about whether or not to have kids.  And while there’s a lot of reasons to, Thanksgiving dinner noise and stress probably isn’t one of them.

Several times, one of the kids grabbed at a delicate wine glass, causing gasps from all assembled. Keeping the three toddlers away from cat, baby, food, stereo wires, cat food, each other, etc. was a full time job—so much so that we only needed six chairs for seven adults.

What was also amazing was the amount of conversational space each child used up. We probably only had about 1/3rd to 1/4 the total amount of discussion we would have had at a non-toddlerized meal.

I’m not saying I don’t like kids, or that I didn’t enjoy Thanksgiving. But I hadn’t encountered that density of kid-caused craziness in a long time, and it did make it clear to me just how much work those munchkins are, and what an effect they have on how your life works.

ha ha!

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Vancouver Water: Day 3

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Day 5 of Drinking the Water