Water Pressure!

When we first moved to our house, we noticed that the water pressure was annoyingly low during the day time hours.  We adjusted our showering schedules to live with it, and just went about our lives that way. 

While we were in the US, there was another embassy family that stayed in our house for a little bit.  Well, apparently while they were here, our annoying water pressure problem got much worse and there were much longer periods where there was NO water (at least upstairs - I think there was always some downstairs).  One of our good friends was helping with the house, and she put in the work order and really fought to get a solution to the problem, so that we'd have water when we got back to Paraguay (people are really helpful in the embassy community).

When we got home, the water pressure was much like what we had experienced earlier.  So, when the "solution" arrived - a 5 foot bright blue tank that they were going to put right in our front yard and dig across our nice paved stone driveway to connect it to the pipes - we were less than thrilled.  However, as the days progressed, the water situation again worsened.  We knew something had to be done, so we had a few discussions with the embassy engineer and the company that they had contracted to do the work.  We also went over to another embassy house that had a buried tank in their front yard to see what that might look like.

In the end, they were able to bury the tank ALL the way (at first they said it would be 2/3 of the way) and they agreed to do landscaping around it and paint the top green.  They also found out that there was another water source that they could access, so that they didn't have to dig a trench across the driveway (which you know would not ever look as good again!!).

I wish I had taken a photo of the tank when it was sitting in our front yard, but here are some photos of the work as it stands now:

 This is the tank that holds the extra water.

 This is the pump that gives us the pressure.

 I'm not sure what this thing is for!!

 Lovely bright blue!

 They dug the hole by hand and then bricked it in.  Mind you, it was 99 degrees for most of last week, with a heat index of about 113. 

They are filling around the tank with sand.  They need to finish that and put a fence around it so that no little children are tempted to jump on it.  And then the landscaper will come back, and we're actually going to have landscaping!!!  I'm very excited about this because there is NO landscaping at the house and it looks really boring the way it currently is.  So, in the end, it may be better than what we started with.  But the best part is that we have water pressure!  I'm going to go take a shower:).

Settled in again and Happy New Year!

Well, it's been a really long time since I've posted here.  We were in the US for most of the month of December and were happy to reconnect with many friends and family (though we were sorry we couldn't catch up with everyone!!!)  John did some training for work in DC for his first two weeks in the US, which gave us girls the time to go to WV and enjoy being there for the Holiday Pops concert.

We had a wonderful time being with family in PA and MA and even got to experience the beginning of the "long winter" that the northeast is experiencing!  I think the girls would have enjoyed a little bit more, but John and I have certainly not been sorry to miss the winter.  We had enough of it the year before in DC!

We arrived back in Paraguay on December 31st in the late afternoon.  It was rainy and not hot - the not hot part was certainly appreciated when we got back!  We had been invited to go ring in the New Year and watch the fireworks over Asuncion, but we just weren't sure about it when we saw all the rain and felt how tired we were.  Well, we decided to go for "just a bit" (it's 2 hours ahead here, so midnight felt like 10.  BUT, John and I had hardly slept on the overnight flight.)  All 4 of us had such a great time that we couldn't help but stay for the big moment, and we were glad we did!

I'm not sure if you can get the idea from these videos, but fireworks were going off all evening all over the city.  As midnight approached, we went up to the roof of our friends apartment building.  The panoramic view was really quite spectacular, and it was a New Year's Eve that we will long remember!