You're allowed to water more, but you shouldn't

So, Mr. 5-Gallon Bucket, we meet again.

The 5-gallon bucket is our Moriarty. We thought we’d seen the last of it when the stupendous El Niño began its onslaught late last year. Our team of climatologists and even the local news’ weatherclowns certainly gave us a good heads-up, allowing us several weeks to clean out our rain gutters and lay in a supply of sandbags.

About the only person who didn’t see it coming was a Long Beach water commissioner who was surprised when we told him El Niño was in the offing. We don’t feel like reminding him of that now, because he’d claim he was right all along, even though he had blundered into rightness. El No-No was a bust. We got some rain, but not the kind that makes your intrepid correspondent wear storm-ready shoes.

We had gone down to the boot shop prior to the projected storms to buy some work boots to wear during the inevitable storm coverage. During one real El Niño, we actually ended up swimming across Willow Street, passing, around mid-chael, a little wire sticking up out of the water, which tued out to be the tip of a submerged car’s antea. During this year’s stormlet we didn’t even have to open an umbrella (which we wouldn’t have done in any event because it’s important to us to not appear foppish).

Happily for us, we didn’t even consider cleaning out the rain gutters. We were right, even though we’d blundered into rightness, by way of laziness.

And so we didn’t get enough rain to cap the drought, the Sierras came up short on snow and what they did get has been melting too rapidly, and La Nina, which is El Niño’s Moriarty, is starting to bring heat and more drought our way. And you know that predications about La Nina will be a lot more accurate than those about the terrors of the Great Flood of 2016.

So, Mr. 5-Gallon Bucket, we meet again.

The bucket had been on hiatus through the last couple of months, but now, with the heat on, it has retued. It is one of our hydro-sacrifices to capture pre-warm shower water in the bucket. Each pre-shower drops about 2.5 gallons into the bucket and, because of our already documented laziness, we wait until it is full before we take it out to dump into the rose beds or fruit trees.

Five gallons of water, you will recall, weighs 41 pounds and change; call it 40 if we leave room for cream. So, every day (our wife, as it tus out, showers, too), we need to lug this damned water bucket like a weakling version of Aquarius out onto our sprawling grounds.

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This, despite the fact that the water commissioners recently voted to ease restrictions on watering in the summer months, allowing irrigation three days a week instead of the previous two-day mandate. Because it rained some.

Thanks, but we’re not doing it. Our lawns, if not blindingly green, are still doing OK, and we don’t water them more than once a month. A lush lawn, to us, is the sign of a water hog, or, at best, a giddy optimist who thinks that El Niño will hang a U-tu Somewhere in the Pacific and wreak its watery wrath upon Southe Califoia in a couple of months. That’s the kind of dangerously rosy outlook we stay clear of. Left unchecked, it will lead a person to clean his rain gutters.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.