AUSTIN, Texas, August 25, 2005 — I'm not that eager to get up but I'm having panic attacks about the water problem. I calm down though. It's not cosmic. I get dressed for tennis and get some coffee and go outside. The puddles and the tiny flow of water looks the same as last night. Only the water has been shut off at the meter all night. Now that makes me wonder. I turn the water back on. The meter flutters to fill the pipes where we drained them testing that it was off and stops. Hmm. Could this be coming from the city feed? Once a couple of decades ago, that feed erupted in our yard.

I well remember the geyser, the argument with the city over whether it was our pipes (um, we had pressure and there was a three-foot geyser in the yard). There is water near the house at the low point but also seeping out the seam between the concrete part of the new drive and the asphalt. The plumber was supposed to be here at eight. He could have participated in another round of water detective. He's nowhere to be seen. FFP comes back from the club. We puzzle over it and decide after a few experiments to call the city, too. The good news is that it seems to make no difference whether we turn on our water or not.

I'm not going to get excited about it. I tell Forrest that it isn't so bad, it could be worse. If one of our parents were in the hospital...that'd be much worse.

I call my dad and check in.

"How's your leak?" he asks and I tell him the saga.

"I told the girls in class you had a leak," he says. I laugh.

So FFP waits for workmen and I go to a tennis workout. Fortunately, we get more frequent breaks than usual in deference to the intense heat. I'm not very good but I always feel good if I know what I'm supposed to be doing in the drills since I just step in now and again as a sub so they are usually new to me.

I am cooked when I go home. The plumber agrees it is or might be the city's pipes and has filled the hole in the bed he dug to find the pipe and left a bit of the Eco-crete chewed out and charged us a bunch of money. The city has promised to send someone to have a look but hasn't done it when I get home. We are not losing water (or very imperceptible amounts anyway) with the water turned on anyway. Sigh. So we wait for the city. We haven't had good experience with this in the past. But so be it. We will soldier on.

I am so tired and hot when I get home I can't shower because I can't stop sweating. I think I'll try to drink water and cool off. I eat a little salad and a little bit of canned vegies FFP heated up but my appetite is gone. It's not the exercise which wasn't that bad. It's the heat.

Finally I get showered. We have some place to go this evening but I don't get dressed for that. I sit around in shorts and T-Shirt. Even though it's cool inside. I think someone from the city may come and check out Lake Preece/Ball. Sure enough, around 4:30, when it is too late to do anything before a city worker's hour of beer comes on the dog barks. (I shouldn't make fun of the city workers today. They spend all day in this heat. I don't know how they survive.) Anyway, there is this portly Hispanic guy scattering drops of chemical in the water near the house. It turns pink. This means it is city water as opposed to a spring or something. He says that because it's near the house it is our pipe, our problem. We tell him about turning off the water for eight hours and it still bubbling up. He doesn't look convinced. He looks at the meter and takes a reading. We tell him about the eruption two decades ago. We point out the water seeping into the street. The lot cants to the house (and creek). If the leak were where the big puddle is, it would still surprise me that it was going uphill (however slightly) to seep out in the gutter. There are puddles in the gutter for six or seven houses down. Maybe more. I sort of wish that it was for sure our problem since then it would be in our power to fix it even though it would mean carving up the driveway, repairing it, much moolah. The guy looks puzzled, too. He says he will send a leak detection team out. That sounds good. Of course, "it's late" (yeah it's seven or eight hours after we called). So it will "be tomorrow." He's all friendly, though, and says that they will let us know what is happening with their investigation. We can only imagine the ocean under the EcoCrete that is allowing a puddle to stand on it.

But we are helpless to do anything about it. We could turn our water off again, I suppose. But that didn't seem to do any good except convince us of our helplessness. So we decide to just go out.

We stop by Mother Egan's Irish Pub. There is a rally for No Nonsense in November which is a group trying to defeat an amendment to the Texas Constitution that expressly abridges the rights of non-traditional couples. (I would say to keep gays from marrying but, apparently, our legislature has put forward something that tends to not stop at damaging the rights of gays but also abridges common law marriage protections.) We have a law against gays getting married. Apparently Rick Perry thinks it's an important constitutional principle. My opinion on this is simple: interpersonal relationships that are blessed by GOD (or the gods or whatever) are, by definition, beyond the purview of a government based on separation of church and state. We should not grant special rights to people who marry as opposed to any two other people. To do so is to base our government on the tenets of one or more religions. A dangerous and slippery slope that has caused us to arrive near to bottom of the hill. Soon we will have our government (like the Iraqis) slipping things into the laws based on women being subservient to men, I guess. I can't even think about the Islamic world because, to me, their beliefs are tantamount to setting men apart as a separate species. When I think about these vast areas of the world, where women are not just inferior but really enslaved, it just makes me feel helpless. Terrorism, pestilence, natural disaster, hate, war. Those are the way of the world. I know that. But it is horrifying that a lot of that world says that women are property. This is the hopeless cause, really. Because I don't think men will easily give up this dominance. It hasn't happened entirely in the Western World although things have improved drastically in my lifetime. But I will die before I will be able to travel the world, regardless of how civilized, safe and peaceful it becomes. Because I am a Western woman who refuses to pretend I'm not. And I think the enslavement of women is the last thing that people address thoroughly. Racial hatred can be tempered by inter-marriage. But there will always be men and women. How convenient.

The rally is on the deck of Mother Egan's. It's hot so we sit inside as people gather, greeting friends as they come in and sharing some fish and chips while I eat some raw vegies and dip. We drink a couple of Guinness, too. We go outside to hear Glen Maxey speak about the campaign to defeat this amendment. Three young kids take notes at a table in front of us. A civics lesson? Young bloggers? Heck, maybe they are college kids working for the UT paper but they look like high school kids.

When it's over, we want cool drinks and a cool dark place. We decide to go to Jeffrey's bar. But others thought of it first. The bar seats are full. We go toward the restaurant, thinking maybe some of the tables in the bar for dining can be assigned to us. But Johnny says just sit in his section. We get cocktails (I get the most refreshing one I know which is a vodka gimlet). We have some cool Ancho Gazpacho with a little crab. It's delicious. I eat most of a plate of crispy oysters, too. FFP has some crab cakes.

We go home and watch TV but don't really find anything to get excited about. I work a crossword in the Statesman. I almost finished today's puzzle in The New York Times, by the way. Which is something because it is Thursday. I almost never finish Thursday.

It is nine o'clock. I didn't get much sleep last night. FFP gets in the bed and starts snoring. I'm falling asleep over the puzzle. So I go to sleep, too. It's early but it feels right.