No more orange water!

Oh glory be, the Poweshiek Water Association is finally a-fixin' to run rural water to our farm! After 18 years of scrubbing rust out of the bathroom fixtures, buying drinking water in town and not owning white clothes because they quickly became orange-tinted, we is gittin' GOOD WATER!

I'm excited. Can you tell? Sorry, Tammy and Bill, I'm a firm supporter of Team Orange but there's only so far I'm willing to go and living with orange water is just too much.

Okay, our well water wasn't toxic. It was a good well, deep and reliable and all that. It was just full of a lot of stuff that made it taste bad. And stain things. Lots of things. If you poured water into a Thermos jug with a white interior, the water was, well, yellow. If you filled the jug often enough, the white interior quickly turned orange. Ditto for the toilet, bathtub, sinks, etc. I wonder how many gallons of Whink rust remover I bought over the last 18 years?

The Farmer grew up on this water. He doesn't think there is a problem. (He wasn't the one scrubbing rust off everything in the house, either.) I grew up on a farm with a sandpoint well. The water was clear and sweet and didn't come loaded with minerals, especially iron, which pretty much ruins the taste.

We don't know exactly when we'll get hooked up but the rumor is within a month. I think I'll go buy something white to celebrate. I'll probably have to start paying my stylist to color my hair, now that I won't have the "rust rinse" to keep these lovely red-brown highlights anymore. And possibly the coolest thing? When our power goes out, we'll still have indoor plumbing because our toilet won't rely on the electric well pump to fill the tank. (I'm still in therapy after that week w/o power back in February '07.)

I think this must be how our grandparents felt when the first rural electric cooperatives strung power lines to outlying homesteads. What new fangled thing will they come up with next?

Here are the water lines leading from the road to our house.

Poweshiek Water rocks!