Ukraine Life Lesson Number 3,469: Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today, because there may not be any water tomorrow.
NOTE: I would like to point out that the word "tomorrow" was originally "to" and "morrow", "morrow" meaning "morning". Thanks to the mashing together ("together" is also a mashing, this time of "to" and "gather") of those two words into ("into" is another mashing) this word ("another" is an-other mashing), I now have to put the preposition "to" in front of "tomorrow" beacause my English forebearers were too lazy to enunciate. Using it seems redundant and sounds akward, but unfortunately it is the only current way to be gramatically correct.
NOTE: That diatribe came from someone who routinely uses "S'up" and "y'all".
Anyway.
Yeah, no water and no one knows for how long, hence the pile of dishes in the kitchen. I suppose I could pull out the stored water and wash them in a tub, but who are we kidding here? My tolerance for foulness will easily outlast the water shutoff. Still, should have washed them yesterday instead of watching a bootleg copy of Battlestar Gallacitca. And possibly should have taken a shower, too.
I don't know exactly what happened to the water, because it's shut off city wide and apparently the city feels that information about cause and duration of a shut off should be a closely-guarded one.
I know where it went, though: into the streets. Actually, the water in the streets is the result of two days with above-freezing temperatures (although they drop back to freezing at night). Still, people only start clearing the sidewalks when the temperature comes above freezing, hacking away at the several-feet thick sheet of ice that's been accreting all winter, exposing the layers of trash that have accumulated all winter (people litter, snow covers, people litter, snow covers, and on and on), but none of that matters because for the first time in months I'm walking on terra firma and this is the herald of the spring to come!
Due to a lack of drainage system, this does mean that the melting snow forms deep and wide puddles everywhere. Hmm. Puddles doesn't quite really describe what we're dealing with here, but the English language doesn't have anything halfway between puddle and pond, although these bodies of water would qualify as being just that. Perhaps if our forebearers had spent more time making up new words instead of mashing the old ones together, we could have filled in this obvious lexical gap.
Some of these whatevers are so dirty and slushy that they are sneakily disguised as asphalt if you're not paying attention. After stepping into one of those freezing whatevers to mid-calf last year while wearing my slacks and on the way to teach class, I have been on my guard.
That was Ukranian Life Lesson Number 468.