Salvaging retro-media

Today is a double-retro media day, liberating James Lee Burke from the ferrous oxide confines of audio cassette books to the cyberworld of digital media format. One MacBook is running Audacity to convert old audio cassette tapes. The other, transcribing CDs. Nothing went swimmingly. It’s complicated.

Imagine my surprise when I ordered four audiobooks on eBay, only to discover they were all on audio cassette tapes. TAPES! Ouch. I did not see that coming. But I was determined to listen to his books, so I had to reinvent the wheel, which meant hauling out an old 2010 MacBook, and borrowing a cassette recorder that had USB connectivity. Of course it wouldn’t work. Of course not. No instructions either. Made in China. You get the picture. Quality Google time, I found I needed Audacity too. OK, retro software. I haven’t used Audacity in 20 years. TG for open source software, it was still around. Many hat tricks under the bridge later, I got it to work, sort of—by using an auxiliary speaker. 

I discovered that Bluetooth speakers won’t work with retro MacBooks or software. Workaround: a speaker wire. My kingdom for a freaking speaker wire. Housesitting’s a btch when you need doohickies. 

Speakerwire scored, two days later. But the recording was too distorted when played through speakers. So I swapped the speaker for headphones and fiddled some more and got Audacity to recognize the USB connections from the audio cassette player. Voilá. The right stuff. The process made me reevaluate the aphorism, third time’s a charm. In my case, third time was pure luck. But the process sure wasn’t intuitive. Not exactly ProTools.

I’ve also learned how to transcribe and clean up audiotapes. I now know what the sound waves of an electronic fart looks like, or an electronic pop, and the difference between them and a terminal K or S, and plosive Ps, or the reader gasping for breath. I learned you can remove much of a word’s sound wave to eliminate distortion (a lot). And it still sounds like a word. Luckily only one tape needed doctoring. But time was not kind to the slide guitar intros, transitions, and exits. So I learned how to clean them up too. Thank you Carlos, sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for letting me look over your shoulder in the recording studio so many years ago. Osmosis happens.

Also, I wanted to move New Iberia Blues to my music files so I could listen to it again later on my iPad vs my car CD player, as much of it is poetry. This man writes pure poetry on the slant. I about died when he described the sky or the bayou. I have to rewind and listen again. And again. And again. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. A writer’s writer. And yes, I do get the obscure literary references embedded like Easter eggs throughout his stories. 

So I popped a CD into my MacBook, fired up iTunes. Nada. I hadn’t counted on my disk reader being wonky. I popped in another CD, nada. Since, I knew Toast worked on this old MacBook, I fired it up, and it triggered the DVD player to read the CD. Talk about going around the horn. By disk 10, I learned the trick, slam that mothersucker into the CD slot like a curve ball over home plate, top of the 9th, bases are loaded. And iTunes arrives all out of breath, wanting to know the score.

Why all the bother, you ask? Why not just buy a digital copy and use an iPad/Pod/Phone? Good question. Most of James Lee Burke’s work has not made it to digital format. And I have an old car with a CD player, no USB or auxiliary functions. The fake radio bluetooth workaround doesn’t work. So if I want to listen to James Lee Burke’s work, I need to go to extreme workarounds.

But I think I’ve met my match with Sunset Limited. I fixed one busted tape, rewinding and splicing it onto a new cassette holder, recorded it with only two bust-ups. TG for ScotchTape. But the final cassette rewound wrong and got tangled. Even I can’t fix this one. So close to the end too.

After a year+ in isolation, my new habit is…

It began simply enough, a friend loaned me some audiobooks. Since I drive long distances to and from work, I roared through his small audiobook collection in no time flat. Luckily he likes murder mysteries too. I loved reading Dick Francis and James Patterson—my aunt Toddy used to send me crates of books. But time has not been kind to my eyes. Besides, you can’t read a book while driving.  

John Grisham I already knew, but Jonathan Kellerman and Lee Child were new to me. I found them a bit gritty but doable. But soon I ran out of audiobooks, but not the road, which led me to trolling thrift stores and eBay for new reads. At the Rohnert Park Goodwill, I found an audiobook by James Lee Burke, an author I had never heard of, called New Iberia Blues. I took a chance on it. The price was right.

Someone asked me what new habit will you take with you from your 14 months of pandemic isolation? My new habit, besides food hoarding, is listening to audiobooks. My new driving habit is listening to audiobooks in my car. There’s an Irish saying, a good story shortens the road. 

Now I usually don’t like being read to, because I am a fast reader. In the past, I’ve shied away from audiobooks because I didn’t like a reader’s voice, or pacing. An audiobook is a three-way pact between the writer, the reader-interpreter, and the listener. There is nothing worse than being held hostage by a bad reader. They can sour a good storyline. I can’t finish that Kathy Reichs Bones novel because I can’t stand the reader’s voice.

Actors are often the worst readers of prose. Go figure. The woman who read Joan Didion’s memoir did it a disservice. Did you really just mispronounce that word? This is not a football fumble. There’s a comma there, use it—it’s not a run-on sentence. Oh FFS, don’t you even see the period? What is this, a California stop sign? Take a breath, fergawdsake. Don’t read like you’re stuck in the mortuary loo without TP. Do you even know what you’re reading? 

If I’m arguing with a reader’s reading style, it’s more than a distraction, it’s an intrusion. And male readers interpreting female characters. Painful. Why the breathless soft girlie voice? Women don’t sound like that. It’s demeaning. Besides, I can’t hear the dialogue when you go all fem, I have to crank the volume up to full blast.

My current long and winding road obsession is James Lee Burke who writes pure poetry on the slant. I want to rewind, and listen again. And again. And again. Not something you can easily do with a car CD player. I about died when he described the sunset as the color of torn plums, or his run-on sentences when he waxes on about the secret depths of the bayou. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. 

Midsummer fires

My great-grandfather built bonfires on his hill farm near Dumnaway, near Bantry, and ran his cattle between the twin flames. The actual midsummer bonfire date in Ireland is June 23. Of course, all those midsummer bonfires in California would be an absolute disaster.

After listening to Billy Collins speak

After listening to Billy Collins speak, I thought of his poem, When I was Ten, and I thought of how 10-year-olds grieve at the idea of time passing. Something Collins hadn’t quite accounted for, when writing the poem, and then when he asked them what they thought, he was surprised to find angst runs deep within—no matter what the age. And yes, even age two is not too soon to worry about the direction of one’s life. Merely the world parameters are smaller, but that same fortitude we all carry within, is like the grief of a thin sliver of the moon waiting to shine as if from within. The stars in their courses never stumble, even the gazelle leaps across the skyscape each night searching for the Pleiades, and we look up into the sky, we look into that face of the moon and wonder about the beginnings and the endings of things. How to do it right. No matter what our chronological age, but we are always in medias res. It is always in the middle of things, there is no age, no circumference of thought. And as for those throwaway images—yes, that eggshell thin porcelain cup. The fragility of memory. I remember that poet’s proverbial jar placed in Tennessee and the slovenly wilderness surrounding it. Sure, there’s a little cultural elitism involved. One offhandedly drops literate phrases in the cultural desert, and utters scholarly things like in medias res, sage tags for the reader. Or to lend credence. All the left brain images we have learned so carefully, are tucked away to save for another day. But in the end, what matters most is not how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin, but how many pins are embedded in in the soles of those dancing angels’ feet.

While most people celebrate Father’s Day

While most people celebrate Father’s Day replete with breakfast rutuals, all I can say is that, for me, it’s complicated—as I had an absentee father (and mother). I knew almost nothing about my father’s side of the family, other than their family was from County Cork, by way of Boston. Lace curtain Irish. I also knew that my father’s mother, my grandmother, committed suicide at an early age, and that her husband, my grandfather, a San Francisco policeman, died soon after, of TB, leaving the teenage boy an orphan, to be raised by an unfit uncle. 

My father’s untold story began to emerge via those scanned photos making the intangible absentee father—somewhat tangible. I first began my scanning odyssey way back in 2015, when we cleaned out my matriarchal grandmother’s house and we found boxes of old photos. Some were from my mother, many from my Aunt Jane—who apparently had a thing for my father—which goes a long way in explaining the sisters lifelong enmity toward each other. And a shoebox collection of my father’s photos mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s.

In my father’s collection, a photo of an unknown woman with a baby raised a red flag. But no real answers. So many surprises, all the random photos that fleshed out distant fragments of memory, which led to new unanswerable questions. These scans of my father were all from prints. Hard copy. So many photos were badly damaged, cloning became my new art form. I also scanned my cousin Sinead Dinsmore’s huge photo collection, adding to the complex multi-generational extended family story. 

Then my friend, Donna Champion bought me a spiffy spit-kit, where I eventually discovered distant relatives on my father’s side, a huge unknown. Still piecing together that family tree, but now I know my great-grandparents’ names on my father’s side. My grandmother Viola Heaney married Joe Hurley, Sr. 

That DNA kit also gave me closure on the photo of that unknown woman and child. Four years later, the scanned photographs abutting new DNA results, yielded new information. My father had a son, I had a half-brother, who in turn, had two sons—both adopted out. Their DNA found me. 

I found an Alaskan connection by way of adoption, which led to the discovery of another generation. When I was first contacted, I denied all connection, but when I delved deeper, I began to find that they were correct, we were related after all. It seems that we all grew up fatherless. Substance abuse, my half-brother’s genetic inheritance, facilitated the two boys adoption. Ironic that my grandmother Viola’s father had a brewery in San Francisco. 

Hopefully, those adopted boys, my nephews, are celebrating Father’s Day with real joy, their adoptive fathers filling the void by stepping into the shoes my father and his son could not fill. And no, none of us have met each other. Hopefully the abusive gene has played out its hand, and these young men whom I cannot yet call brother, or nephew, do not carry that destructive gene.

And I found an old lineage lhread leading back to Nova Scotia, Antigonish, by way of Cork, Ireland, I found a far-distant French and Native connection I could not ameleorate. And then, in a flash, I understood, the Algonquin connection that spanned the eastern seaboard, the Acadians, the trail of tears. My great grandfather, Henry Hurley’s wife. Still don’t have the link from County Cork to Nova Scotia but I suspect it was a forced immigration from the great famine.

As I scanned photos, I began to put the story together, the generic rage I held against my father for abandoning me as a child, began to ameliorate, and morph into something else. Perhaps a vague understanding. My orphaned father, raised by a vitriolic alcoholic uncle—the model was at hand. The uncle left the shipyards of Boston to raise a nephew in San Francisco, instilled a lifetime of rage in my father who sought solace in the bottle. Talk about complex feelings. Sometimes there are glimmerings of forgiveness, like faint stars on the horizon.

My pissy prose riff off on the Billy Collins workshop

Pick any color. The ink always returns from the harsh light of the page to the comforting darkness of the inkwell. The next line is always waiting in the wings, unforeseeable, but inevitable. Gnashing its teeth. It is an attempt to see the poem as a living thing. Tight received forms, pro temp forms for the moment. OCD poets rearranging words from the chaos. We are always at work, it’s never done. We’re making the poem for the reader. Tidy poems, said, Mary Oliver, is the work of poetry. Self-expression is way overrated. Mohler said life is parabolic, no, he said life is paperwork, and manipulates the reader into empathy. Do the paperwork. Do the poets. We must find the time for sound, I thought. Poem is artifact of time and culture. You need a timeline. Matthew Arnold builds the reader a tidy scaffold of comfort, then removes it, brutally, like in Dover Beach. Like a hangman. Poet as master manipulator, or dominatrix. Dylan was in the imperative present tense of what is. Facing the death bed, not to rage, is the norm. He rages. He rages. Do not go gentle. Is the audience even willing to meet the writer halfway? I think not.  Poet as observer counting a murder of crows. Reader imbues meaning. Kay Ryan’s turtle was an inside job. Who won the race? The vowels said they’ve abandoned their end stations and have given up their guns for the well-meadowed line. The rabbit died. Puzzle poems and acoustic echo chambers to sound off outside the cathedral of poetry. A prose poem is an excuse to write bad poetry. Wordsworth was recollecting at the epicenter, I, eye the ego centric at the center of it all. Or was that Keats? No tranquility for the wokid. Poetry‘s job is to make the reader emotional. The pleasure of a poem is discovering the endings. Get in, get out early. A poem is a work order. Poetry is all courtship and no payoff. There is no sex, only a lot of panting. The sonnet is a proscribed birthday genre, but only if it ends in a zero. Null and void. Avoid the wet spot. Sadly, the self adulation urge is not to put away childish things. Begin with a generalization. Then get pacific. The argument of Aquinas’ angels and scholasticism, the theological skulduggery of education gets in the way of poetry. But all those questions about angels and asking them silly questions. Then what? Take care of the reader. An angel dancing alone in an empty room, to a jazz quartet, what about all those secularized angels? What did they have to say? And what about She? Did she want to hang up her wings in order to eternally count pinheads onto infinity? Sounds like a hellish form purgatory to me. Oh, Beatrice! Wherefore art thou?


Most of this prose is from a Billy Collins workshop, some of which became a prose poem, After listening to Billy Collins speak, and a tiny bit of it drifted into my Angels playing for sax freewrite. I suppose I should shape this into something or other, it has potential,mbut I am both intrigued and tired of it. Not a good combo. It took me forever to finish adding my Billy Notes, and this run on. 

Added 1/22.

Billy Collins workshop, Book Passage, June 19, 2021

Billy Collins, In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

In The Driver’s Seat of Poetry: A Live Poetry Session

Some 700 of us from around the world joined Billy Collins for a three-hour Zoom workshop at $75 a pop, hosted by Book Passage in Corte Madera. When I did the math, I thought, who says that poetry doesn’t pay? Crime still pays better. Still, I was looking forward to taking the workshop with Billy as I had long admired his poems and have used them when I have taught Poetry Out Loud workshops because they are so approachable. I like his narrative personae.

Billy Collins, two-times US poet laureate, also offers free poetry chats on Facebook, most weeks, usually Tu., Th. at 5:30 PM, EST. The workshops, more like fireside chats, sans fireplace, evolved as a response to Covid isolation. Check it out.

For our workshop, Billy gave us a reading list, and asked us to write out all the model poems in longhand before the workshop. Since I had only just discovered the workshop literally minutes before it actually began, I was scrambling to catch up. She who hesitates, is…  That was the fastest three minutes ever spent, I managed to contact Book Passage, pay the tuition, get my link, and and then get my Zoom link to work. I was in. A grand slam. There are times when the universe conspires to work with you. I was all damseled about and out of breath. Even still, I managed to scribble out Sonnet 73. But it was a rush to get to the finish line, and that also meant that the entire tone of my experience of the residency was wide-eyed and out of breath.

Billy Collins opens with a discussion on the forms of poetry and then offers us a caveat, saying, this is not how I normally teach, this is not a writing workshop, nor is it is it a lecture. (For lack of a better definition, it’s craft lecture. OK, so, call it a poetry session.) He says, I’m not trying to look at a poem as a finished product but to return imaginatively to the scene of the crime, to draw the ink off the page, and put it back into the inkwell, and to see the work as a work in progress, to deduce the intentions of the poet. (In other words, a poem is never finished, only abandoned….)

Masks Off Day, watching Dancing to Jerusalema

https://www.facebook.com/111138863712827/videos/3637795652958491/

I love this tiny dancer, I love watching her extraordinary moves. I love how the Jerusalema viral dance challenge swept the globe in 2020. It certainly was a highlight during the beginning days of the Covid lockdown. It also seems like it was so long ago. Watching all these people dance to Jerusalema during those darkest of times, still makes me weep. Nomcebo Zikode’s voice is mesmerizing. During those darkest of days, during the pandemic, we defied the odds, and we danced. Oh, how we danced the darkness and the fear away. Someone said that dancing to Jerusalema was like the song of God expressing itself inside your DNA. From the cradle of civilization, the origins of humankind, Mother Africa brought the world together into one global village—for a moment. When the ego melts, the dance begins. The Dali Lama said, Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength. The resilience of the psyche douring those macabre times was an extraordinary feat. We hardly had the time to mourn our dead. So many fallen. Then the brutality of what followed, as society fell apart at the seams. We were brutally reminded that there is only one race—the human race. For a moment, the song, Jerusalema, brought the world together. For a moment, the world was choreographed. For a moment, we danced and breathed as one. For a moment. Literally the definition of conspiracy, is to breathe together. And yet the breath was also the harbinger of death. We masked up and hoped death would look the other way. I have had exactly five hugs since the pandemic. Three of them this month. Lest we forget, as California officially opens up from the lockdown with “Mask Off” day, the unveiling of the year, and business returns to “normal” think of that journey, how far we’ve come. The depths we’ve plumeted. The heights we’ve risen to. The idea of society returning back to normal. I don’t know If I want that ever again. Let the lessons of 2020 not be solely remembered in hindsight, but also be a vision for our future. What changes of habit will you carry with you from the lockdown? I will watch the children dance. I will remember to live in the moment. I will remember to breathe. I will remember to love. Circular breathing. This breath, this day.

Masks off day

It’s kind of weird being out in public to do things other than the absolute necessities. I think I have to re-socialize. I was Miss Crankypants while shopping for used clothing. Though we don’t have to wear masks anymore, most people did, but the dressing rooms are still locked. What’s with that? So I tried on clothes in the aisles. Yeah, my agro levels rose. Turfy, I was. And then it dawned on me that I hadn’t done anything other than grocery shopping in so long that the only socialization skills I had were akin to hunting and gathering. I didn’t know how to behave in public. I think I’ve gone feral again. I’m sure the heat didn’t help. I may not be ready for the concept of leisurely eating out in a restaurant for quite some time. Last week, Glenn Ingersoll and met up at a mostly empty cafe on College and I could barely contain myself, the fight-flight syndrome was big with this one.

Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts? I have no idea what you want me to do.

URL is not available to Google

It cannot be indexed. Learn more 

Somehow I don’t think it’s the URL that’s the redirect problem. You are the problem. You changed the software. Not me. I only provided the content. Not HTML code. I used your software. So this is an internal problem. Why shoot the artist in the foot? Dodging bullets is not my thing. This doesn’t even make sense. But then, I’m arguing with a bot. A lot of good that will do. 

Dear Google, why do you keep flagging my posts?

Does anyone work for Google? I am still having problems with my blog. I seem to be singled out for non-existent errors. The Blogspot post harassment continues at my blogsite, mohurley.blogspot.com. I have combed Google Help, poste queries, and have not gotten anywhere. I am at my wit’s end.

I have most definitely forever lost several posts, the 13 recent ones were reinstated (for allegedly going against community standards! Yeah, no), but not the previous ones. 

Google Help said to send in the URL to restore it, but how can I do that when a post is completely missing…and not in draft form either. I can pinpoint the dates of two deleted posts. One deleted post of a play I wrote, I at least had a hard copy of, but the other was of a historic event written directly in Blogger. Juanita Musson’s memorial gathering and photos at Olompali. I’m sure other posts are missing as well. Since I use Facebook to generate writing material, I have been double-checking posts via Facebook Memories. And, no, the missing posts were not catalogued on the Wayback Machine.

Now many of my other posts are being flagged for console search errors. I have never used outside software, only Blogger. It’s mostly straightforward text, that is, poetry. And I haven’t a clue as to why so many my posts are suddenly being flagged. 

The closest I can come to, is that Google installed a new mobile web crawler in 2019, that is causing all these flags. If I knew that ignoring it would mean that it wasn’t indexed, I could live with that, but my last experience with being flagged is that Google can, and does remove blog post without warning. 

I am devastated by the loss of my work, writing is my art form. I have 4000+ posts. At present I am madly hand-copying and repasting everything into text documents, to back it up, but I am only 1/3 done. What Google chooses to flag seems to be rather random. There is no pattern that I can see.I have also backed up my blog with Google Takeout. But that does not resolve the problem. And no, the missing posts were not in the Google Takeout download. I won’t even mention the post that Blogger turned into gibberish during the last upgrade.

MacBookPro journals

A couple of months ago, I managed to find a mid-2012 MacBookPro I planned to soup up. I was just about to buy one last year when COVID-19 struck. That put a big wrench in things. No one wanted to meet up. Not for love, nor money—and certainly not for old MacBooks. 

After a few Marketplace deals fell through at the last minute, I despaired. One seller gave her MBP to her brother at the last moment—as I was leaving to pick it up. But the real asscake was the guy who sold the MBP I had planned to purchase—during the time it took me to drive down from Sonoma to SF. 

He then tried to fob off another dead MBP in its place, saying, Yeah, it works fine but the battery is dead. Yeah, no. I felt like I was in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. I tried all the restart tricks in the book, including attempting to jumpstart it with a portable hard drive with an OS. Dead motherboard, and the battery indicator was green. After trying to sell it to me for parts, he handed me the dead MBP as a doorprize—but, hey, at least the battery was good, I swapped it out.

I am amazed by all those oily Marketplace guys offhandedly trying to fob off their lemony laptop’s age, or obfuscate its speed, or hide its lack of memory. As if I wouldn’t notice. After months of scanning ads for overpriced MBPs on Marketplace (Craigslist was useless), I finally found a likely candidate. It had to be a faster mid-2012 MacBookPro, not early-2012, not late-2012 (non-upgradable Retina). And not too expensive. 

I met this guy in the Richmond Costco parking lot, he was solid, not trying to hide anything. After a cursory check, I didn’t even barter—I paid more than I wanted for his MacBook Pro—$300. But it had good bones and a fast GhZ speed. My fastest used Mac purchase ever. I didn’t even need to run the usual checks. 

Besides, he had also upgraded it to Catalina at my request. That was the deal clincher. He had no idea that it would even run Catalina. As I put it through its paces, he looked at it anew. I was afraid he’d change his mind right there in the parking lot. I paid him off so fast, I forgot to get a bill of sale. Alas, I needed Catalina to run TurboTax. It seem the only reason I ever upgrade my MacBooks is to run tax software. A sad state of affairs.

DEAR GOOGLE, Coverage issues have been detected and flagged on my blogspot site. They are mostly poems, or jpgs of poems.

I keep getting warnings from Google that coverage issues have been detected and URLs have bee flagged on my blogspot site. They are mostly poems, or jpgs of poems. I have no idea what I am supposed to do. Or what could possibly be wrong with them. As it is, Google has deleted a few of my posts, most of which I was able to resurrect, but not all. I mourn the loss of my Juanita Musson memorial gathering at Olompali. 

On my corona poem, I made a brand new blog entry for it. That didn’t work. On the others. I made minute corrections to see if that would help. I even renamed some of them. Nope. Some allowed me to index URL, some didn’t. Looking at referring URLs did not shed any light. I don’t know what to do. But it seems that the Google mobile indexing URL is the culprit. It doesn’t seem to like many of my pages. Because they’re not mobile friendly? Bah!

Some of the warnings include:

Page is not mobile friendly How so? And do I even care?

Text too small to read. Really? And what is wrong with Georgia 12-point type? Actually it’s listed as normal size. It’s closer to 18-point text. You've done away with the font size numbers.

Clickable elements too close together. OK, Google, this is YOUR software. I have no idea what you mean. You don’t like my embedded links? I have not altered HTML. nor am I using other software to compose my pieces. So, what gives? Besides, there are no hot hyperlinks in most these posts. They’re poems fergawdsakes.

Is now a good time to bring up how Blogger chewed up my Shoe de Gras Mouse Wars  post on 11/30/2011, and turned it into an equation field of html madness? 

Notice there's no Hava <3 3="" all="" and="" any="" as="" asian="" at="" attract="" besides="" bird-mad="" cakes="" can.="" chocolate.="" clean="" d="" dark="" does="" drawer="" dry="" field="" go="" godiva="" goods="" hand.="" house="" i="" is="" letting="" list="" mice.=""

DEAR GOOGLE, My Woodside play is missing, looks like Google deleted it

OK, FOUND V. 3 on an old hard drive. Will restore it later. Right now I’m too disenheartened to think.

Final copy is missing. I found a first draft in my scanned notes. The short play would’ve been posted on my blog Sept 26, 2016. It was a smash success. I did a lot of historical research and incorporated folklore. Neil was so good as a vagrant ghost that some of the guests tried to run him off.Literally.

Woodside Spook Party Sat Sept 24TH 2016

Preparing for the drought

In California, we are hunkering down in serious drought mode. Perhaps the worst drought cycle in living history. The past 18 months have been the driest recorded in 143 years of Northern California rainfall records. This is a reminder—if we haven’t already done so—that it’s time to radically change our relationship to water. Less is more. Conserve, conserve, conserve. 

Every drop of water is precious. I know that most of you know this already. But we need to put what we know into radical practice, and share our water stories—in solidarity—if only to remind ourselves to be more diligent to keep our total usage under 50 gallons a day, which is still far too much.

Be proactive. Fix all those leaks, and use a bucket to catch any drips from faucets. Use a bucket to catch the cold water from the shower. Use a plug in the bathtub, or shower drain (or use a child’s wading pool as a catchment system) to catch the water to bail that water for the plants, or to flush the toilet. 

This is the land of two-minute showers. Get wet, turn off the shower water. Lather up. Turn on the shower to rinse. Ditto that with the toothbrush drill. Turn off the water while you brush. Don’t shower daily. Your skin will thank you. Sponge baths were a thing until very recent times. And don’t be frivilous, wear clothing until it’s actually dirty, then launder it. Or be more like Jack Reacher.

Be innovative. If you aim it right, with velocity, you can use a quart to a half-gallon of water to dump the toilet, depending on the bowl model, and your aim. Perfect that velocity, and aim and trajectory. Please practice first with clean water. Ya don’t wanna know... If you have an old toilet, put bricks or half gallons of filled milk containers for displacement. I used three half-gallon containers, plus a brick and the old toilet still flushed. Do not, I repeat, do not use displacement rocks in the toilet tank. Sure. Go ahead. Ask me why. Not my finest moment.

It goes without saying, don’t flush for pee. Toss those twatwipes in the trash, don’t clog the sewer pipes. Listen for unauthorized running water in the pipes. Maybe it’s your toilet having a secret inner life. It happens. Maybe it’s time to kick it to the curb, make it into a planter, and get a low flush toilet.

Think different. Use a wash basin for your dishes, and carry the water out to the garden. Don’t forget to collect those stray forks and spoons from the flowerbeds. Especially if they’re silver. Yes. Your plants may like the gesture that you’re offering them genuine silver cutlery but they really can’t use them as they have no hands. And if they’re fruits and vegetables, you might hurt their feelings. Use biodegradable soap or original Dawn, not detergent. 

Back in the 1970s, when I worked for a family in Belvedere, I rigged the washing machine so that all the water went into a big plastic garbage can on a dolly, and I wheeled it into the garden. That was back in the days of phosphate soap. None of the plants died. However they did develop a lint problem. Kill the fn lawn already. Plant native species. Every drop counts. You know the drill. We got this.

What are your water saving tricks and strategies?