As devoted readers know, and Facebook and Twitter readers probably do not, I am living in an 8m travel trailer, because:
- I got really tired of throwing away rent money without building equity
- I got obsessive about my carbon footprint, and
- I’m too poor to buy an eco-friendly house
It is amazing how one adjusts to one’s environment. When I moved in I found it impossibly claustrophobic, and now it seems gloriously homey and spacious. Presumably this has a lower bound — I’m not sure if I’d ever consider a casket to be a roomy domicile — but it works quite nicely. There are lots of pros and lots of cons to this lifestyle, but the primary con has to be water. The coupling for a direct water line into the trailer is leaky, and because:
- I would get really tired of throwing away water without growing anything
- I got obsessive about my H2O footprint, and
- I’m too poor to have it fixed
I get by filling a storage tank once a week or so. I’m not quite sure what the tank is made of, but I’m fairly confident it’s something like “polyshittylene”. Good grief is it noxious. I was buying water by the gallon bottle for months and months, but wanted to stop because:
- I got really tired of putting plastic into the recycling stream only having used it once
- I got obsessive about my hydrocarbon footprint, and
- I’m too poor to buy jugs of water
I bought — OK, “got my mom to buy” — a Brita pitcher. Awesome. I put that horrid noxious water through it, and try as I might to detect off-odors or -flavors, I just cannot. The filtered water tastes better than bottled “Spring Water” (“spring” is a word in a dialect of the local Morongo “Indian” “tribe” that means “tap”).
It is very difficult sometimes to refrain from trying to pour various things through the filter to “see what would happen” — tea, coffee, scotch whisky, soy milk, soy sauce, vinegar, ad literally nauseum. I’ll spare you the three bullet points that reduce to “I don’t want to waste the Brita filters” and “I’m too poor to do the experiments without corporate sponsors”.
I think my Dragonwell is done steeping. Mmm: yummy with filtered water. See you on the other side of the cuppa.
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The first time I tried Brita filtered water, I was impressed. It does a lovely job.
Neal Stephenson has a scene in Zodiac in which the protagonist (an eco-kinda-terrorist) swallows water polluted by toxic discharge and goes to an aquarium supply store to buy activated charcoal so he can grind it up and eat it.
I never did bother to look up whether this is absurd or not.
The Mythbusters episode where they run vodka through a filter was fascinating, because while the did say that you can’t turn cheap vodka into top-shelf stuff that way, the vodka expert that they brought in was able to rank with perfect accuracy how many times each of ten shots had been passed through the filter. It’s not the sort of thing that a layman would be likely to notice, but it is pretty effective.
I don’t know about the stuff that someone would get at a pet store, but plenty of my friends have had paramedics administer activated charcoal to them for ::ahem:: various reasons.
Oh, why be circumspect? Fairly certain that was for “ingesting dangerous amounts of toxic sludge” also.
The safety guy at work saw that Mythbusters episode and bought a dedicated vodka filter. He loves it.
In other news, he’s making his own mock Grand Marnier now, too.
Didn’t both you and Amal partake of my (OK, yes, bizarre) rosemary liqueur? That period of experimentation taught me that, counterintuitively to me, sugar and herbs cannot mask poor-quality vodka.
There’s a Grand Marnier reserve of some sort in the wild right now — W&LD has it IIRC — that builds on a 25-year-old cognac (or thereabouts). I was left wondering if the other ingredients were of a higher grade as well.
Oh, on the topic of high-quality ingredients: you, Amal, and I are all bergamot nuts, right? I just recently learned of an Italian marmalade made solely of Bergamot oranges and sugar. Wow. Meh wants nao — but I cannot find it in stock anywhere.