City Life.

There are many things to love about living in Tucson. Beautiful sunsets, amicable weather all year long, plenty to do when it comes to exploring the outdoors, the list goes on. But one of the things not on my list is the sprawl. Tucson has strip mall after strip mall, usually accompanied by mid 20th century housing developments in many directions.

I’ve known a little behind the history of American suburbia; it was a conscious effort to get more people driving. Phil Edwards, formerly of Vox, shares a fantastic video on the subject.

This is a capture of sunset from our balcony. I feel like my iPhone X didn’t quite capture the spectacular beauty of Mother Nature’s efforts, but the colors are still enjoyable, nonetheless.

I’m ready for the country to settle down a bit. Things have been too hectic for too long. It’s wonderful that our planet can keep showing us its natural beauty.

I occasionally need the reminder.

Last week our condo building had some hot water issues. There are several hot water tanks on the top floor of the building and they feed water to the condo units via recirculating pumps. One of the pumps failed and therefore we had lowered water pressure. It would take nearly five minutes for hot water to get to our shower. I had to plan ahead in the morning. I don’t even speak English that well in the morning.

At the same time, the cold water main into our unit sprung a very small leak and decided to start dripping in the ceiling, resulting in water spots and the like above the washing machine in the utility room. We had a maintenance team over and they cut a hole in the ceiling sheetrock. The source of the leak was identified; a copper joint was the culprit. It is located less than two inches away from our gas main.

Let’s not go boom.

So, the Condo Association and Management Company hired a plumber to take care of a few jobs at once. A very eccentric man, he quickly fixed the leak in our laundry room with some sort of new compression fittings for copper piping that didn’t require soldering or any other sort of flame. Now, we just have to get our ceiling repaired.

Afterwards he went on to fix the few other plumbing issues throughout the building, including the hot water issue on the top floor. Apparently the pumps are not the type to be easily obtained, but within a few days, the management company sent out an all-points bulletin declaring our hot water issues were resolved. After a few days of low pressure showers, I was ready to get back to business with my morning routine.

I’m (not surprisingly) somewhat picky about my shower experience. I like a fairly high pressure shower. I want a shower that is going to pin me against the wall. I carefully picked out a specific shower head known for its aggressive tendencies and have been enjoying the results of my research. I like a shower that requires a seat belt.

The thing is, after the declaration of “all is well”, the water pressure was still low. It was better than it was but it was in no way where it was before the whole affair began. I didn’t need a seat belt. I needed a booster seat.

I made another call to the plumber.

Before charging us for another visit, he suggested we take off the shower head and make sure no sediment had come through the pipes during the recent discussion. So I followed his lead and took off the shower head. I shook it to make sure nothing was in there, it was clear. I looked up into the pipe coming out of the wall, all was clear. I decided to run water without the shower head just to see how good the pressure was. It was good, not great. All of a sudden, the pipes made a few seconds of a banging sound in the wall and something came flying out in the water stream.

It was an aerator for a faucet.

Now, it wasn’t in the pipe when I looked inside. It wasn’t in the shower head. It apparently had been floating around in the pipes for who knows how long and had apparently made its way to our unit to impede my shower experience. Once it exited the pipe, the water pressure shot up well above anything we had experienced before. I turned off the water, put the shower head back in place, and decided to give it a whirl.

I’m now going to need a five point seat belt for my shower experience. I couldn’t be more delighted.

Tanya Tucker and Helen Reddy both released the song “Delta Dawn” around the same time in my youth. My dad, born on a farm in the middle of cow country, listened to WHEN hit radio, which played the Helen Reddy version of the hit song.

My mom, who was born and raised in the center of Syracuse, New York, where they had folks of different skin colors at her school, preferred the Tanya Tucker version from the country radio station WSCP. I found this odd, because my mother had a bit of a feminist Helen Reddy “I Am Woman” vibe going on. My dad was born in the country but he liked city music and my mom was born in the city and she liked country music. She had a Marlo Thomas hairdo. She watched Donahue and everything.