Yearnings

I miss having hot water…

There’s one time a year when the city-supplied hot water is turned off in Ekaterinburg, and pipes are cleaned of corrosion, or some such thing. That happens for a week or so, and usually there are posters announcing it in advance. Not this time. Nobody knows why. And nobody we’ve talked to knows when the hot water will come back on. 

Although we didn’t have hot water our first day here, we did the next day. I thought we had had a temporary problem, and didn’t know that we’d lose warm water again. Fortunately I did some laundry and washed my hair that day.

There’s an obvious solution to the lack of hot water: make it yourself on the stove. It’s the way I do dishes. But a second problem arises, because the flow of cold water here is never very strong. It’s better in the kitchen than in the bathroom, however. The flow from the bath faucet is more like a leak. Today it took me 30 minutes to get water ankle deep in the tub – and that was with adding pots and pots of water that I had heated on the stove.

For the time being I’m having trouble going with the flow…