Water, water everywhere....

...and not a drop to drink!

What if you turned on your nice shiny faucet and nothing came out? What if you turned it on and all that came out was brown, icky, smelly liquid you wouldn't give your neighbors pigs?

Still worse, what if you had no faucet and your only source of water was the nearby creek?

"Hmmm...not too bad," you say.

Ah, but I failed to mention that just upstream from you, the neighbors cows were wandering in the same creek all day, every day, doing what cows do...the unpleasant, smelly thing that cows do, not the milk!

Oh, also upstream from you another neighbor does her laundry in this same creek...and her family plays in the water sometimes too...her children doing what children will do sometimes.

THIS creek is the only source of water in your life. Your children are thirsty and this is the only water anywhere near your home. NOW what?

"WHAT" is you and your children drink this water and pick up every water-borne illness known to man...some of them dying as a result, others just being sick all the time.

But it's the only water there is? What can you do?

If you are the Mother in Uganda struggling with this, there' s hardly anything to do. It's a deadly, unsolvable problem.

However, there are solutions for this Mother. Take a look at www.waterfortheworld.com to see an inexpensive, easily sustainable method for giving struggling children everywhere water that is safe to drink. This device plus dirty water plus a car battery plus table salt = clean, safe water.

You can actually provide clean water for a whole village with this thing...you, personally, for a small investment. Check it out....and think about the water the next time you turn on your faucet to drink clean, clear, safe, odor-free water. Think about it.

Right, Left, Right, Left

You wouldn't believe what it takes to get me out the door in the morning to walk. Every excuse in the book from, "Wait, I want to see the next item on the Today Show, " to "Maybe I'll just skip today."

One day I had decided to skip the walking...I am old, after all...when my husband said, "When are you leaving on your walk?" I couldn't tell him I was being a lazy bum, so I said, "In just a couple of minutes," and then I left! (You just never know what a little comment can accomplish!)

Today, the weather radar (on, you guessed it, the Today Show) showed we were the next target of a big rain storm. So, did I hurry? No, just piddled around a little longer knowing that the path of these storms is unpredictable, after all, and the weather man was saying we likely wouldn't get much rain anyway. Piddle, wait, stall...but I did leave...though with a zip bag for my iPod in case the dark clouds insisted on unloading on me.

Walk went fine...until the last .3 mile. Drip, drip, drip. Drop, stream, drop...I put away the iPod about here. Honest downpour started a little too far from my sheltered driveway....a gusher. So, I got wet...dripping wet before I got to the house.

Maybe if I had eliminated the "piddle, wait, stall" section of my personal fitness program I could have come home dry!

The CoatesRack!

I must really be a techno-granny if I have my own blog, right? Sometimes I'm not sure about the tech part, but the granny thing is for real. Twelve grandchildren and I feel like I'm about, oh, 27 or so. (Well, don't ask my knees about this or check the just-discovered-last-night smile/squint lines!!) And then there's the fact that my youngest baby is 30...so I must be older than 27 after all.

Still trying to figure out how an old lady should act though. Not sure I'll ever get that right, no matter how old I get. Let me know what you think I should do about acting my age, OK? I need all the help I can get!