Life in the balance....................

The Taoists revered water because they saw it as a symbol of humility and service.  Water nurtures and sustains all living things, and yet it seeks nothing for itself—it always flows to the lowest place.
     So, be like water, be humble, nurture yourself and others.  And stay at the back, where you are free to slip in and out of life's situations unnoticed and unencumbered.  That is the watercourse way.
     You don't need razzmatazz and glamour.  That only serves to create emotional weight in your life, pumping the ego into a false sense of importance.  Too much hype and attention, and the ego becomes a spoiled brat, and impossible to control.  It will soon drag you away from the Tao, from what is natural and good.  Trash that nonsense before it makes you sick.  You don't need it.  All you need is balance—and the contentment, creativity, love, and comprehension that flows from that.

-Stuart Wilde, Infinite Self:  33 Steps to Reclaiming Your Inner Power

Message...................................

“There is a hidden message in every waterfall. It says, if you are flexible, falling will not hurt you!” 

-Mehmet Murat ildan

It's the simple things.................

      About a decade ago, two Harvard professors, David Cutler and Grant Miller, set out to ascertain the impact of chlorination (and other water filtration techniques) between 1900 and 1930, the period when they were implemented across the United States.  Because extensive data existed for rates of disease and particularly infant mortality in different communities around the country, and because chlorination systems were rolled out in a staggered fashion, Cutler and Miller were able to get an extremely accurate portrait of chlorine's effect on public health.  They found  that clean drinking water led to a 43 percent reduction in total mortality in the average American city.  Even more impressive, chlorine and filtration systems reduced infant mortality by 74 percent, and child mortality by almost as much.
      It is important to pause for a second to reflect on the significance of those numbers, to take them out of the dry domain of public health statistics and into the realm of lived experience.  Until the twentieth century, one of the givens of being a parent was that you faced a very high likelihood that at least one of your children would die at an early age.  What may well be the most excruciating experience that we can confront - the loss of a child - was simply a routine fact of existence.  Today, in the developed world at least, that routine fact has been turned into a rarity.  One of the most fundamental challenges of being alive - keeping your  children safe from harm - was dramatically lessened, in part through massive engineering projects, and in part through the invisible collision between compounds of calcium hypochlorite and microscopic bacteria.  The people behind that revolution didn't become rich, and very few of them became famous.  But they left an imprint on our lives that is in many ways more profound than the legacy of Edison or Rockefeller or Ford.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made The Modern World

Oooops.................................

Into every life some rain must fall.  Went down to the Old School this morning to unlock the front door for the drywall finishers and to check on a few things.   When empty, it is generally a very quiet building, but not this morning.  About halfway down the main corridor, I became aware of an unusual dull roar.  Uh-oh.   Following the sound to the former boiler room, I was greeted by about three feet of water on the lower level floor and several high pressure sprays of water.  The new 2" water meter was installed yesterday.  Sometime in the early morning hours, the gasket on the meter failed and water did what water does.  There is nothing wrong with the City of Newark's water pressure.

We were fortunate in many regards.  The electricians had hoped to energize the main electric panel on Thursday, but didn't because AEP wasn't ready yet.  We are about a week away from framing the lower level.   Neither of those improvements would benefit from getting soaked, and they would have.   Also, if the gasket had blown tonight, with no one scheduled to be in the building tomorrow, the flooding would have continued for hours more and spread out of the basement onto the main floor.  That would have made a serious mess.  We dodged a bullet.

Interesting conclusion:  The plumber showed up about 12 minutes after I called him.  Within a half hour he had a pump set up to drain the water out of the basement.  Within an hour, the fire department showed up.  One of our neighbors, seeing water gushing from the pump, called 911 and the fire department was dispatched.  It is comforting to know that people are paying attention.

Camera phone doesn't do justice to the water flow

It's supposed to be a living room, not a swimming pool

High water marks

Is this true......................?

Some Iranian officials warn that tens of millions of Iranians will have to leave their homes for lack of water. The country has used up 70% of its groundwater and its literally drying up major rivers to maintain consumption. It's the worst ecological disaster in modern history.

-David P. Goldman, talking about Iran while not wearing his rose-colored glasses

Apparently, it is a thing.  See here or here.  Who knew?

Beauty..........................

info here

More fun facts................................

...................about the oceans than you ever wanted to know.