The shower and the first difference!

Living together has been something I have wanted with my partner for a long time and after a trip on the rough Bay of Biscay, is it all plain sailing……

Back in the UK we had two homes, two of just about everything and we never lived together as such, so when time alone was needed, we had our space and our things.
Russ, has a beautiful bathroom and the luxury of a large shower. One that came with a never-ending supply of hot water. My man loves his shower and if I timed him he would be in there for over 10 minutes. Now I know that having a shower is about water saving, but not with Russ. He got a shock when after considering he lived in a single person household, that he should get a water meter. I mean he was paying the standard charge for a 3 bed house, it was going to save money.
My thinking was…..No Russ. You shower for 10 mins twice a day, which would be more than a family of 5.

And all that was crammed in a fiesta car with the two of us!

Then the move to Spain and my little apartment that was going to become the home for two of us.
I already had all the basics but with a man now coming along there were other necessities such as a microwave and a Xbox, all his DVDs and computer games. The benefits were going to be a King size quilt and a warm place to cuddle in the night.

Then there had to be an awkward discussion.

I know my bathroom is basic and not luxurious. I had even gone to the trouble to clear out shelf space for him and room in the wardrobes and chest of drawers but there was still the bathroom issue!
Not the bathroom itself as that is basic, clean and totally serviceable, there was another problem.
The water tank……..

This is typically a small apartment sized tank that holds probably about 40 gallons of water and takes forever to heat it up. Now a normal shower takes about 35 litres for a 5 minute wash. With Russ the water is on the highest pressure and he stays in there for at least 10 minutes. OK I know that 70 litres of water is only a small proportion of 40 gallons about 1/3rd but the cold water is coming into the tank and not getting heated up so the hot water quickly runs out!
Add in the fact that we go dog walking and come in smelling and dirty then a shower can take even longer……
I did warn him, maybe just not enough. Unfortunately one day I let him get a shower first and then I tried to shower. The water was freezing and it took nearly 2 hours to heat up again. it’s winter here and the daily temperature in the flat rarely gets over 15 degrees so cold and unhappy I sulked!

OK so no point in sulking, just a lesson learned and it’s not to grab the shower first it’s actually about sometimes going with the flow and allowing something wrong to happen. Now instead of telling someone that a problem will happen maybe just once in a while and when it is safe to do so, you should let the situation play out. Maybe we molly coddle our kids too much and protect them from situations where they could learn from. In work we don’t always have to be right.
It’s a bit of an urban myth that in Chinese the word crisis is made up of two symbols one means ‘disaster‘ and the other ‘opportunity’ the other symbol actually means ‘pivitol‘. For each thing that goes wrong there does not have to be a crisis but it could be pivitol in moving forward and learning.
Lets take that pivitol step and change some of the dramas in our lives into learning experiences that we can pivot on and go forward with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22