Oh man!

sparxMind.com celebrated its 2 year birthday (from the date of the first post) on July 21st, and I totally forgot about it!

Instead, I posted about drinking too much water making you have to pee. A lot – almost proportional to the amount of water drank… I'm still trying to figure this odd connection out.

So anyway… Happy Birthday sparxMind! And don't drink too much water!

Water treatment seems like it should be a pretty solidly-researched and standardized thing. Granted, for most of our history obtaining water has been completely different – natural sources (rivers, lakes, etc.), rain, wells.. modern plumbing is relatively new compared to all of that. Even looking at it like that, we've been doing this long enough that water should be – water.

If I can go to a major city and get good clean water out of a faucet, why, here, do I have to choke down water that either tastes overly metallic or reaks of chlorine? I guess most people don't really care, but I'd really like to have easier (faucet) access to water that doesn't taste like other things.

As you may remember, I planned on watching the Chicago River be dyed a brilliant green shade of green this weekend. Definitely not the main reason I went to Chicago, but it was something that I wanted to see while there. I wanted to see it so badly that I even went as far as going to the river and looking at the water.

And so did about 25 bazillion people.

Here's where we run into a little snag though – the dying was supposed to take place at 10:45am, before the parade. We got there maybe 20-30 minutes early and managed to squeeze into a decent viewing area. 10:45 came and went, and nothing happened. People (myself included) started seeing lighter green streaks in the water, but that might have just been our imaginations. This definitely wasn't the transformation from "Eeeeeew!" to "Ooooooh!" that I was expecting. So when it got to be about 11:30 we left. Dissappointed, a bit frustrated, we left.

From the pictures I saw later that day, I have to assume that the dying happened at some point between 12 and 2pm.

I bet it was interesting to watch.

Turns out I'm actually a starfish.