Hard Facts about Soft Water

If you're a city mouse, there are many aspects of life that you probably take for granted compared with your country cousins. City mice worry about parking spaces; country mice leave their cars unlocked. City mice worry about their apartments being robbed while their country cousins fret over flooded basements. City mice don't want to see rats scouring their trash for leftovers; country mice watch out for raccoons.

But water seems like a given. Surely water is water, no? No. Water is dirty and needs to be filtered. Water has microbuggies and needs to go thru special UV lights. Water is hard and needs to be softened.

City mice get their water from pipes, but ours comes from a well, and the well runs about 200' deep. It's pretty safe to drink, untreated, but it's a good idea to get a filter and better still to have a UV filter, but that doesn't take the minerals out of the stuff.

When I was a kid, I never heard mention of hard or soft water. Later I experienced it in Australia, where we had very soft water. Hard water has an overabundance of minerals. It's great for showering unless you're a bowl, in which case you come out of the dishwasher covered in white crystaline gunk.

We recently purchased a shmancy water softener that removes those minerals. Our water is as soft as a baby's bottom. But have you ever tried showering with a baby's bottom? We recently bought some nice soaps in town, but at this rate, they'll last till Maeve is in college. Soft water makes it really hard to remove soap, so we just dab the soap lightly with a fingertip and we're good for the next 5 minutes of scrubbing.