You know what's a good shovel ready project? Your grave.

Have you been listening to WTOP this week? I know you have because NPR is doing their pledge drive, and you don’t seem to be the type of girl who listens to Elliott or the Junkies. You're a lady and you pinch your cheeks if you want color. Only trollops use make-up. Have you heard on WTOP about these 300 houses in Virginia that need to boil their water because an 8 inch water main broke?

It’s not 300 households. It’s one household. It’s us. We have to boil our water before we can drink it because we live in the 15th century, and our water main was already made from lead and asbestos before it ruptured and got filled with cholera. We can’t wash our dishes in it. We can’t open our mouths when we shower. The dog can’t even drink out of the toilet so the dog is drinking bottle water. I have to keep the dog from eating old, random poop when we go for walks, but he’s drinking water out of a bottle like he’s some sort of burnt-up koala.

We had no water on Sunday, so neighbors were borrowing each other’s IDs and showering at the gym where they weren’t members. And showers are a really big deal in our neighborhood. Last October, when another pipe burst and it only effected one street, one of our neighbors allowed another to shower at her house. But later in November, after the shower-provider found out the shower-taker had voted for McCain, she went over to her house with itemized water bills and asked for a few dollars to cover the difference between the last two months.

Living several days without clean water would not be a big deal for us except 1) sacks of potatoes need water make their food and to be alive and 2) this same water main has BROKEN FOUR TIMES SINCE NEW YEARS! It’s surprising if we wake up and our car hasn’t collapsed into an eroding sinkhole.

So now our kitchen and fridge are filled with jugs of water which we will drink and gargle with until the pipes are clean again. We will bury whatever we have left in the back yard like good survivalists because this will surely happen again in the next few days. The supervisor of our giant street hole tries to keep our spirits up whenever anyone comes over to chat by joking that our pipes put the Ye Olde in Ye Olde Town Alexandria and that they were scheduled to be replaced this year but the city ran out of money. It seems they couldn’t get a proper loan that they could later default on like regular Americans.