"Troubles", Right Here in River City

The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Training jets scream over the playful rap of dogs chasing and being chased in circles, round and round and round again. Sitting in the backyard, taking a personal "sick" day, and it's more than sinus congestion and urban infections that plague body and soul. Lord, I suspect today I'm just feeling...old.

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

As I sit here with dogs and birds and shade and Wordsworth and the endless whine of rubber tires on ancient asphalt, two issues are all the talk around River City Facebook circles. Clean water and new schools.

We're one week out from a bond election that would finance school infrastructure projects, and my old-age absentee ballot lies where it landed by snail mail a month ago. 
My mind has flipped and reflipped over this one so many times; let's just say I'm torn, still, on this one.

Lazlo leaps into my lap! Ah, the joys of writing outdoors. His primary issue is a simple, "Play with me!"

The other, perhaps more pressing, certainly more distressing issue is the water thing. As noted here more than once, River City may soon -- as in a matter of two or three years -- run out of water.

Now, too many folks have entangled the water issue with the school bond issue. These two are linked purely by coincidence and timing. The school bond is a school district issue; water is a city issue. Passage of the school bond  will not affect River City's water supply nor the lack thereof.

Yet, one still hears (reads), "Well! What good is a multimillion dollar megaschool gonna do us if there no water to drink! Huh? You'd think 'they'ed have sense enough to use that money to build another lake!"

Build another lake. Building another lake as a municipal water resource absolutely cannot be done with school district money. Period. End of discussion.

Build another lake. I could get in my car right now and drive to no less than half a dozen lakes within a couple of hours that are all but dried out. So long as this drought continues, folks, what good would another multimillion dollar -- NOT school money -- dry hole in the prairie do us, huh?

Then, too, there are no end of "dead horse" floggers. They SHOULDA built that lake when they had the chance! They COULDA let the Corp of Engineers dredge the old lake for free! We all WOULDA been a lot better off now if they hadn't been running things back then!

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA never solved a damn thing, People. We need creative, thoughtful, workable solutions to meeting our water crisis going forward, not reliving old sins from the past.

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Water we do when the water is through?

My younger (17 days) brother by another mother, A.D., stopped by yesterday afternoon. Like tried and true cavalry he arrived in the nick of time to help this tired hand move out an old swayback bed and replace it with a much firmer trundle we picked up from Janel over at Bluebonnet Hill. I Pray this morning, Lord, that my back is properly thankful to all who had a hand in switching out the beds.

It's all good when A.D. drops by. We sat awhile in the shade of the Stinky White Tree, watching birds dodge the dogs as they (birds) flitted about the feeders. Sippin' on sweet tea and Dr Pepper, talk turned to our increasingly critical lack of water. Water and the lack thereof is about all anyone talks about these days, what with the drought holding fast.

A.D., bless his heart, is one of those hapless individuals who is either unaware of the caliber of disaster presented by this continuing drought or blissfully chooses to ignore the situation, trusting that it will get better all on its own. He perked up and paid attention, though, when I said River City has less than a year's worth of water remaining in the reservoirs from which we draw.

We are fast approaching a time, a real here-and-now point in history unthinkable back when we all spent summers running through lawn sprinklers. We are within 300-odd days of turning on a tap and nothing coming out.

Three hundred days. Possibly less. If that's not sobering, I don't know what is.

Like I've said before, this drought is bad all over more than anywhere else. Saw in The Paper this morning where the folks down in Corpus Christi are considering sinking $5 million into a test desalination plant in order to tap into Gulf water. San Angelo is the latest Texas town to seriously look at treating waste water and returning it from potty to potable.

Lake Wichita 2013

Here in River City public works people revealed they have tapped into our own treated waste water return pipeline to water greens on the municipal golf course. That certainly has ticked off more than a few folks. Of course, if that water wasn't being used at the golf course, it would be released into the Wichita River for the next few weeks until all the i-dotting and t-crossing is done on the state reuse permits.

All over town "Pray for Rain" yard signs are more numerous than politicians at a pancake feed. More and more folks are shelling out cash by the bucketload to have a well sunk in their yards, while the City of Wichita Falls is paying $50,000 a month to a cloud-seeding outfit.

We've all manner of bans in place, from a ban on using "city" water to water yards to how many days per week car washes may be open for business.

Personally, I think we need one more "ban" and a show of solidarity in recognizing that we are the answer to our crises. We need a ban on shaving -- ALL shaving, ladies -- untill Stage Four restrictions are lifted. Then we can tell by your fuzzy face -- and legs -- that we're all in this together!