Breaker breaker...

We noticed a puddle at the street end of our cul de sac this morning on our way to church. Not a good sign during a cold Wisconsin winter. The puddle was bigger when we got home and there was a front end loader tooling around. Not good signs. We monitored the goings on and sure enough at 11:40 the doorbell rang and it was a public works guy coming to tell us that they were going to turn off the water at noon to fix a water main break. I asked about how long the water might be off. He estimated most of the day. We hurried around and filled some containers with water - some for drinking, and some in case we needed to flush the toilets more than once. It was no crisis by any means (although the dishwasher left us in a bit of a quandary as we'd just started it before the man came to the door and we weren't sure how many cycles of water it would need....in the end we waited for it to drain and then stopped it, but that caused a litany of beeps to emerge from it - one every 4 seconds or so - for the duration. ), but it did give me cause to think about how much we take running water for granted. Clean running water. What a simple thing, but what a difference it makes in our daily lives! Thankfully our run in with drought lasted less than 2 hours and I was able to restart the dishwasher. Now to find something to do with the water sitting on the counter so it's not wasted....