I got back this afternoon from an overnight in Boston and dinner with my best friend from high school.   We’ve only seen each other a couple times in the past 27 years, but last night we were back in the groove, picking up where we left off.

We had a good time talking about life, and art, and music and relationships and all that stuff. As the night wore on I told him that if he’d been gay there’s no doubt we would have been boyfriends.   He said it would have worked if I’d been a girl.

I’ll stick to being friends.

I came home and promptly did nothing.  Oh sure, I got a list of things to do, an increasingly long list, but I’m just not in the mood.

Instead I cleaned the fish tank.

Great thing about New York City: They don’t chlorinate the water here. They just pipe it straight from upstate.

I put the tank under the bathtub faucet and let the water run for a while.  And the fish didn’t die.

Don’t try that in Texas.    I’ve overfilled ponds at the farmhouse in the past and the fish go crazy swimming in panic from chlorine poisoning.  I’ve tried squirting the ponds with anti-chlorine stuff but it’s usually too late. The fish will be floating before nightfall.

The water in New York City comes from several reservoirs in upstate and the Catskills, along with water from the Delaware and Hudson Rivers.  The city is building a water treatment plant for future sanitation issues, but right now the captured water is considered some of the best drinking water supplied to a large city anywhere in the world. At least, that’s what the locals tell me.

Get this: The residents don’t have water meters on their properties.  So there’s no financial cost to letting the tap run.  Even the city estimates it’s losing something like 36 million gallons of water per day due to leaks in the municipal plumbing and aquifers.

That would clean a lot of fish tanks.

After I take a long shower, I’m going to bed.

The to-do list can wait till tomorrow.