Chilling in SLC

Since arriving in Salt Lake, we have been hanging out at Clay and Lisa's house.  It is a cute house with internet access and beer, and we are tired and appreciative of such.  This was all going quite well.  Tomko was making some sort of dinner concoction of potatoes, fish, and seasoning, and I was arriving home from the pharmacy with the medicine that I hadn't been able to get when we were in Maryland, and Lisa was straightening up while Clay was in the shower.

Suddenly, I noticed that water was coming from near the water heater, where water shouldn't be, and I started shouting for Lisa and Clay and hung up my phone.  The sewage pipe had backed up and was leaking all over the laundry room floor.  Lisa and I found a wet-vac in the garage and mostly fixed the immediate problem, but we officially could no longer use any water in the house.  Clay had some technical discussion with his uncle and they determined that it could be fixed... but Lisa refused to stay in the house, so we all went over to Clay's parents' place, taking Tomko's dish of food with us.

They have the cutest new dog ever.  Shadow is small and black and sleek and partially spaniel and partially something black and sleek.  (I do not claim to be a dog expert.)

Shadow rolling around the backyard

One thing that is interesting about Salt Lake is that it is a DESERT.  This nice green grass that Shadow is rolling around in needs to be watered at least once or preferably twice a day.  People have built-in sprinklers or ones on timers.  Clay's neighbor had one of the ones that waaaaves baaack and fooorth, which is the only kind I remember from sprinklers to run through as a child.  Sprinklers.  Everywhere.

Clay's father, Jeff, works with water management and told us a lot about how Nevada was trying to take water from aquifers in Utah and how Nevada was screwed out of the Colorado River water from before Las Vegas existed and so on and so on.  I never think this much about water.  I usually think about "can I drink it?" and "will it make me ill?"

Tomorrow night, there's going to be a meteor shower, and we're going to go somewhere to watch it.  Maybe a mountain, maybe the salt flats.  Mary and Patience are supposed to arrive here tomorrow evening, so maybe we can camp out in Patience somewhere.  We'll find a good spot.