things you should know if we ever get married for your greencard: my showering habits

Here's the deal: I'm not a quick-shower-taker. I know, it's horrible-- it uses so much water and the cost of reheating a whole water tank is probably most of our heating bill, but I just can't do it. I've tried. But I have skin that doesn't know how to exfoliate itself-- I can't remember the name of it, but my mom has it too, and it makes for rough, bumpy skin, and if I don't spend enough time exfoliating it for myself, it makes these ugly scratchy patches that don't go away unless I'm swimming in the Springs, which are an hour and a half away at best, and it makes the rest of my skin feel sandy. All the time. Especially across my chest and shoulders, and I just can't handle it. Add to this the fact that I have hip-length hair that's really frizzy and fly away unless I give it a deep-conditioning treatment every time I wash it, and a scalp that flakes off whole unless I'm soaking it in shampoo for at least five minutes, and there you have a recipe for, at best, if I don't shave and forget to scrub my back, about twenty minutes. When I take the time to do that, you're looking at more like fourty. So the last thing I need is a weekly olive-oil conditioning mask added to this mess, right? Only I totally do, because my hair is feeling the almost imperceptible change in seasons more than I am, and it's gone all dry and splitty again.

Another thing you should know: I've been told I have latent engineering talents (or, at least the ASVAB I took in high school says I do), and I've been thinking about this problem. See, so many of the things that green up a household are kind of crap on luxuries like long hot showers that force your pores open. That's why hippies are always kind of... well, let's not go there. But there should be a way to reuse water in a shower. Stay with me, I know it sounds a little gross, but hear me out: most of the water used in a shower is just keeping you wet, and isn't all that dirty or soapy. So if there was a holding tank-- and optional one, that you could turn off when you're coming in from twelve hours of laying sod or something-- that holds the offically accepted prudent amount of water under the drain, it could catch the water you use in the early part of the shower and recirculate it back to the shower head. There could be filters to clean some of the soap out, and one of those as-you-need-it heaters that's hooked up to a thermometer that you can set to the temp you want, and when the recirculated water falls below that temperature, it can turn on and reheat it. This way, when you feel like taking a long shower, you're only using a decent amount of water, and once the bugs in the design are worked out (I'm looking at you, German and / or Japanese luxury engineers), you wouldn't even really need to notice that you're reusing water! Then, when you're done, this thoroughly used water can go into a biodynamic greywater system, filter through the reclaiming swamps, and then water your garden (because we'll all need Victory Gardens of our owns soon enough, I think, and they may as well be integrated into the functioning of the home), then excess can go back into the municiple water system. Best of all, this can be a retrofit, like turning old diesel engines into biodeisel engines-- any house with pipes could be fitted with the recycling system.

By the way, if you're an engineer and you want to build this, go ahead, but you'd better give me credit and cut me in on the patents and such. This is a dated entry-- it's proof I thought of it! ~;)

Also, I can't wait until houses have designs like this all the time.