Dog Days & Sweetwater

8/5/2019

“Goin’ to Carolina in My Mind”—by several artists you’ve probably heard of: James Taylor, Alison Krause, etc., etc. That was the SIMH today. Even if you’ve never been to either of the Carolinas, the song invokes memories of places in your past, places you can easily fall into melancholy about and desperately wish to go there. Guess I had nothing specific to want to go there for because the song was quickly replaced by half dozen other songs. 

Ah. It’s just as well, doesn’t look like I have a reason to go there soon anyway.

August!? Is this possible, Just a couple of days ago, it was time to mow the grass for the first time of the Spring, and now we see “dog days” of Summer just ahead! Where does the time go? How quickly the calendar on the wall gets worn down! However, this is a long month with no holidays, like March, and that means we should get a lot done this month. Now, if only we had something to do! Hey, let’s do this first, let’s get organized! Yeah, that’s it—organized. We can get a lot done if we’ll first get organized! Or not. Sort of sounds like make work, time fillers, guv’ment work, right?

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer. They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star system Sirius, which Greek and Roman astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. —Wikipedia

In my growing up years there were warnings about swimming in stagnant water, seemingly always with the warning about mad dogs and rabies being more dangerous during this time. I’m pretty sure I never did understand any of those warnings, but I heeded them, just the same. It was about that time in my young life someone introduced me to the chlorine pool at the city park in Franklin, IN (our county seat about 6 miles from home.) I heard about the pool and girls at the pool and that sounded like reason enough to figure out how to get there. It was fun, but not really what I wanted to do. Besides, likely I felt out of place. Those people could really swim! and dive! 

Well, we finished the month of July, the 24th month of Blue Jug Alkaline Water and Health Market existence, with 12 stores: 8 open, one about to be open, and 3 more purchased and searching for locations. That’s as fast as we dare expand for a while, probably. We’re pretty excited about the quality of the people we have attracted and are going to be the best supplier we can be to help insure their success. 

This is a fun business for several reasons: first and foremost, we just make the world’s best drinking water! We wouldn’t know how to do it if the Lord had not ordained it to be what mankind should drink. The Lord sends down the filtered and very clean rain water and it hits the ground seeking to be its best self. By that I mean water is attracted to minerals and salts which it finds in the earth. And since it seeks its own level, it goes underground, gathering mineral deposits as it goes. Sometime, somewhere water collects in such quantity that it pools and becomes available, either by pressure or pump, to be brought into what mankind can reach down and drink. 

That’s what we do. Now we start from a different spot (we’re not the Lord, so we have to “undo” the bad stuff which mankind has done to the water) and we get rid of the things which make water taste and smell bad. Then, we flow the water slowly over the same minerals it used to be able to pick up from our soil and underground rock beds. Mmm! that makes really great drinking water, like the Lord God made in the first place! The reason it is useful to people is we make it available at a low price. If people want to, they can put a miniature version of our system in their homes. It’s just more upfront money most people don’t have or they don’t own where they live and can’t fool around with the landlord’s plumbing. So, we make it available to them in our stores. And, it really is the best possible drinking water!

We don’t know how many of these stores we might be able to help build, in fact, we feel privileged to have helped this many folks get into the business. But, we have a lot of interest in a lot of other cities, so we’ll just help when we have the opportunity. Water the way it’s meant to be for as many who want it. The business itself isn’t hard to do, just retail store hours. It isn’t hard to learn it. Our system which makes the water so good is very sophisticated, but simple to operate and you don’t have to be a plumber or a technician of any kind to do it. Any city of about 15,000 or more people is large enough to support one of our stores, so there remains several thousand possibilities.

Thanks for reading, the Elder