Camping Water

Well how shit am I at keeping this blog thing going? I would be terrible at gardening, oh wait, I AM terrible at gardening, go figure….

Seeing as my last post was at Christmas time last year, and now it’s nearly Christmas time again according to the shopping malls. OCTOBER IS TOO EARLY FOR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS BY THE WAY. Seriously, I get it if you are incapacitated, too lazy or too elderly to take them down and put them back up each year so you just leave them to rot on your front porch until its ‘that time of year again’ and brush off the dog shit and cobwebs for another round of dead xmas cheer and sickly candy canes, but if you are an able bodied ‘give a shit’ kind of person then dude, leave that stuff for December when it actually matters. Christmas decorations in October is just creepy and in the same category as Easter Eggs in January.

  
Anyway, what a year it has been so far! It started off with extremely shitty people doing super shitty things to yours truly, times were tough I tell ya. But needless to say I came out on top and better than ever as I always do because I am fucking awesome and that shitty person will continue to be shitty as usual. What goes around comes around and that is the end of that.

LIFE IS EXTREMELY GOOD NOW.

But, I of course continue through this life doing things only I myself can manage to do having the endearing quality of slight retardation, which in turn brings joy to others and material to write this terrible blog. Sliding myself into a gentle segway of the actual point of this post….

‘Camping Water’

I have been living and working in Budapest for most of the year, a hot European summer was starting to show off its perky little beams, and I was beavering away in a huge old abandoned something-a-rather building turned production office, a dusty glass and concrete maze. My office got HOT, and not only because I was in it, but it was like a glasshouse, and I, but a sapling inside wilting in the heat and desperate for air to spill in through the 300 miniature glass windows that could only be opened with a wooden rod & hook contraption which turned out to be more useful at smashing the windows out rather than turning the cranks.

I worked up a real thirst in that hot box and water was readily available from the water cooler a short 2 minute walk away down the other end of the workroom, but when you get in ‘work mode’ or just fucking lazy like me and can’t be bothered walking to the water cooler 10,000 times a day to fill up, it becomes a tiring task, I drink alot of water. But alas, on one of these dreaded cooler trips I had finally found a solution….

There on the workroom floor, glistening in the afternoon light was 10… 20…30 large bottles of camping water. You know, the big bottles that you take with you when you go away camping or gypsy caravaning. Here is a helpful picture I found on the internet for your quick reference   —->

So, naturally I snapped up one of these bad boys and stashed it under my desk for quick and handy refilling of my water bottle whenever needed, I don’t like cold water anyway, room temp is just fine, so hey presto! (Do people still say that?) My problems were solved.

I drank this water over the course of a few weeks, finished it off and grabbed another one. During that last week before finishing the first bottle I started to have quite severe stomach cramps and was not feeling well at all, I put it down to wearing stupidly tight pants that I had bought as I was going through the aforementioned time with shitty people, I lost a bit of weight and that is the worst time to buy pants, they did not fit like they did when I bought them and were now acting as a stomach stapler. So, as I was cracking the seal on my new elixir of life and began to pour it into my drink bottle, my Hungarian work mate cried out with her arms up in the air “What are you doing! You aren’t going to drink that are you!?!?” I stared at her blankly, my other work mate stared at her blankly, and in the blankly staring triangle of confusion I said “yes, I am”

Alarm and then amusement washed over the concerned parties face as I proceed to tell her about my sheer laziness, that I had already drunk 5 litres of the camping water and I was simply opening a new one. She then presented me with the label on the bottle which was all in Hungarian but had symbols on it as clear as day of the intended uses and non uses for the ‘water’. I could make out that this ‘water’ was used for the following:

Industrial Irons, car radiators, fish tanks, photo processing and more.

What it was clearly NOT used for, was human consumption. That was made very clear by the stick figure symbol in a circle with a big red strike through the middle. This was infact demineralised water which is very dangerous to humans if taken in large quantities. At this stage I had drunk more than enough to kill a small goat. So then came the sickness shortly after…..Ha! I was violently ill for about a week. Like could not move without spewing my face off kind of ill. It was incredible and terrible all at the same time. I ate my body weight in charcoal pills which was fun (‘fun’) because my vomit came out like a big black mushroom cloud, it was mental. I did potentially…a little bit…at one point think, while I was lying on the sofa in my lounge room with some strange Hungarian doctor wearing terrible jeans up to his eyeballs with his tee-shirt tucked in jamming a drip into my arm for the second time, that I may have poisoned myself beyond repair and I was going to be in miserable pain for the rest of my life, bed ridden and frail. Only being fed through a tube….

But, as it turns out I eventually lived to tell the tale, without much damage to my innards or self esteem. There is absolutely no moral to the camping water story apart from always read the labels on things, and if in foreign countries look for symbols? I managed to fit into those tight pants again, even for just a week, so not all is lost…

WORD.