a no pressure situation.

I haven't wanted to mention this, because I would hate to speak ill of my house, but I've had some problems with water pressure. You could call it house loyalty, or you could say that I was just too embarrassed to admit that I'd already started experiencing house troubles. I didn't want you to think that my house is a lemon. I was just making lemonade, though only figuratively, because I didn't really have the water pressure to make actual lemonade.

First, I noticed that it took a long time for the hot water to come on in the kitchen. It would be quicker to get cold water out of the faucet and then heat it up on the stove top. And then I noticed that the plumbing wasn't so good with multi-tasking. So you could flush the toilet, but only if you didn't feel like washing your hands. And you might as well run the washer only at night, because it would take half an hour to fill up with water and you couldn't do anything else that required wetness during that time.

All of that was annoying, but I thought I could probably live with it by planning my water use and adopting a general "let it mellow" philosophy. But the showers were the most irritating. Taking a shower in my house was like having a friend hold a watering can over your head. I had to allow extra time in the mornings just for washing my hair, because it took so long to get it wet and then rinse it out. There's a fancy adjustable shower head, too, but in this case, the settings seemed to range from mostly useless to completely pathetic.

I emailed my brother Sid, who installs septic systems for a living and just generally knows things about how stuff works (or doesn't work). He gave me a list of things to check, which I asked Josh to do while I held a flashlight and gave encouragement. We learned many things: there is a Fisher Price toy car in the crawl space, acceptable ranges for a water pressure gauge to read, and to always turn off the water before removing a water pressure gauge. We did not learn why my water pressure was so miserably bad. Sid promised to come look at it the next time he was in town.

Before that happened, I had a week or so to ponder the joys of home ownership. I could not just call up the landlord and complain. I mean, I could, but I'd figured out at about age ten that when you call yourself, you get a busy signal. Maybe this would be an easy fix, and maybe it would require we dig up the whole yard. I went ahead and started resigning myself to the worst case scenario. Actually, I had no idea what the worst case scenario might be, but I was pretty sure it would be expensive.

Sid went into my crawl space and came out five minutes later to tell me that I had a clogged filter. This, my friends, is what brothers are for. Then we went to Lowes, he told me what to buy, which he then installed. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, then ran the dishwasher and the clothes washer all at the same time.

And then, then! I took a shower. It was the most magnificent shower in the history of the world. The hot water came on quickly and the jets were powerful. I was able to wash my whole body in less time than it took me to wash my hair the week before. I emerged so fresh and so clean and ready to finally be able to blog about the joys of home ownership and perhaps have a nice glass of lemonade.