Real simplemindedness

From Real Simple's advice on at-home vacations:

"Make staying hydrated a beautiful thing.  Take a cue from Rancho La Puerta, in Tecate, Mexico: Fill your prettiest pitchers with ice water and slices of lemon, orange, or cucumber.  Place them (each with a glass) at various strategic points around the house and in a shady spot outside.  Then, as you go about your day, stop often to take a long, cool, flavorful pull."

Let's see how that plays out:


1.  In this apartment, besides me, lives an engineer who can walk into a perfectly bare room & find something to spill or break. When in the presence of liquids & glassware, he has a wingspan of several yards.  I have come to accept this, more or less, but between the engineer & the poodle, whose main ambition is to get under the feet of humans & topple them, & who has practiced this diligently for 16 years, there are no surviving pitchers, pretty or otherwise.  Even if I bought some, booby-trapping this apartment with full pitchers of water -- each with a glass -- at various strategic points around the place (we have no private "outside" area, shady or otherwise) would result in way too much mopping up & picking broken glass out of the feet.  I suppose one could simplify matters by placing a mop next to each pretty pitcher & its glass, so that he could fall over that & speed the process up a bit, but as a vacation activity it lacks appeal.

2.  Next, as I go about my day, bleeding gently while searching for the tweezers & Band-Aids & wading through the rivers of spilled water, I get to stop often for a "flavorful pull."  City air that comes in through the window fans is certainly polluted enough to add flavor, & the fruit flies & perhaps worse that will show up for the fruit slices will add more.  I'm confused about "pull," too, unless they mean the magnetic pull that the bathroom will have on anyone who downs multiple pitchers of water in the course of a day.  Perhaps it's a typo for "pill," which the drinker of gallons of bug- & airborne-particulate-flavored water may well need.

3.  And finally, in Real Simple Land, you can litter an apartment (or a "shady spot outside") with open, uninsulated pitchers of ice water on a hot July day & somehow, hours later in the day, the water will still be cold. 

Here's how Rancho La Puerta presumably does it:  they hire someone to keep the pitchers full & pick out the insects & restock the ice cubes (& mop up after any engineer guests).  It's crowded enough in the apartment without my having to dodge minions bearing pitchers of ice water, but that's irrelevant; if I could afford to pay for minions, I wouldn't have to stay home while on vacation.