A Pint's a Pound. . . .

You have no doubt heard the old adage "A pint's a pound the world around." If you are dealing with the American pint (rather than the British imperial pint), then a pint does weigh a little over a pound (1.04318 pounds). There are two pints to a quart, and four quarts to a gallon, so four gallons of water weighs roughly 33.381 pounds. And what does this little math problem have to do with PARD's callous mismanagement of the public cemeteries? Faced with constant water shutoffs at Austin Memorial Park (AMP) due to frequent water main breaks, I began carry a crate with four one-gallon jugs in my trunk. For I had discovered that even though the water might be cut off throughout the cemetery, the water spigot by the front gate next to the PARD office always functioned. So when the water was shut off throughout AMP during my weekly visit, I would pull up to the front spigot, take out my crate and water jugs, then fill up all four jugs. I would then drive to the section containing my parents' and my niece's graves and stumble some 30 feet over the rough and rutted ground lugging a crate holding some 30-odd pounds of water to water the memorial gardens there. Fortunately, as I and my sister-in-law had chosen native, drought-hardy plants, this was enough to keep the gardens going even when all the surrounding lawn turned toasty brown. However, what began as just a precaution against the periodic water-cutoffs now has become a weekly chore, as every functioning hose has disappeared from the section where my family plots are located and, as far as I can tell from driving through the cemetery, from every spigot in AMP. When I visited my family's graves on January 6, 2023, I saw a PARD employee placing a hose in his truck. I asked him if they were taking all the hoses, and he told me no. Well, I guess he was being truthful, because there is one hose remaining, a hose so kinked, torn, and full of holes that it is useless unless you feel like taking an outdoor shower. So my weekly visits to my parents and niece now include hauling roughly 33 pounds of water in order to water the gardens that were planted in their memory (and to prevent PARD from desecrating their gravesites with ruts and tire tracks).

And speaking of watering, I apologize that I have not yet updated the page regarding the frequent water cutoffs at AMP. I did receive a response to my Public Information Act Request from PARD for the all records regarding water main damage, breaks, and repairs at the AMP. It was the typical electronic document dump of well over 100 pages of disparate documents. I had been working on going through the documents, trying to impose some sort of order, and creating a chart or table setting out each time the water was shut off and when it was turned back on. However, in December my laptop fried and I learned the hard way that Apple iCloud was not automatically backing up everything on my computer desktop. So I have had to start the whole slog over again.