H2No.

Think about what you do every day with water. Drink it. Flush it. Bathe in it. Brush with it. Wash with it. It’s probably the most essential item for human existence (next to air). Now imagine if you didn’t have ready access to that water. What would you do?

Imagine our surprise when after a long, sweaty day we got home to a note on the front door of our condo building. “Water has been turned off due to a leak in Unit 7. Should be turned on sometime Thursday.”

It’s Wednesday evening.

We go upstairs to find drips coming out of our faucets. Jim quickly fills two plastic cups with the remaining water left in our pipes. Jim uses the toilet, flushes, and it goes down. I use the other toilet and nothing happens. Our water is officially gone. With ½ cup of water, we each brushed our teeth (badly) and quickly fell to sleep. I work up early to find that, of course, the water was not turned back on. Jim woke up early to head off to work since his office has a gym with a shower and he planned on showering and shaving. He used the remaining ½ cup of water to brush his teeth. How nice!

We were down to one cup of water. I said goodbye and burned some time before work. I used ½ my cup of water to wash my face and suffered soap in the eyes and a thin filmy residue on my face. I had to resort to using filtered water from our refrigerator to again brush my teeth terribly.

The final step in this madness was my hair. My hair does NOTHING if it is not washed and I’m one of those unfortunate people who have to wash their hair every single day. My only choice was to stick all of it up. Somehow. My hair is still pretty short so this requires two things: bobby pins and hairspray. After carefully getting each hair in place (trust me, it still looked awful), I reached for my hairspray…only to find that it had gone missing. I searched everywhere. The hairspray was not to be found. I smirked to myself and called my lovely husband. Lo and behold, he had taken the hairspray because his “hair has gotten too long, [he] needs a haircut, and [his] hair will not stick up without it.” Needless to say, I was furious and hung up the phone.

I traipsed off to work looking terrible, called said husband again, and said the following, “I’m going to say something out of love and then that will be it. I am very angry right now. Not only did you get to go to work, take a shower, shave, and use water, you also took my hairspray because your ‘hair won’t stand up’ without it. As a result, I look terrible on all fronts because of you! Next time, buy your own hairspray and STOP USING MINE!” I then hung up the phone and went my merry way.

Life lesson: Water is important and hairspray is a close second.