hints from heloise's godson

That shot looks like another of my name-the-subject photographs. It wasn't meant to be.

Our water in these parts is hard. And not just a little hard. The water in my swimming pool has so much iron in it that it constantly points to magnetic north.

I have just learned to deal with it. But one aspect does not happen often enough for me to immediately recall the solution.

Let me explain. There are a few sinks in the house I do not use very often. The sink in the laundry room and the sink at the pool are two examples.

Last week, I tried both faucets -- and the flow of water was about what Gasim had in his canteen trekking across the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Because of the calcification in my well water, the filters in the faucet often clog up.

When my friend Robin was here last year, we took out all of the filters and did -- something. My friend Gary told me to just throw them away and to buy new ones. They are inexpensive.

But I have become Mexican enough that I will now try to repair what can be repaired. If I could only remember how.

I took the filters into the kitchen while I prepared a salad. Most of my handyman skills have been learned by doing them. I am a kinetic learner.

All it took was picking up a bottle of vinegar for the salad dressing to jar my memory. White vinegar. I am supposed to put the filters in a bath of white vinegar to dissolve the calcification. Mnemonics do work.

And so I did. It took less than an hour to restore the water flow in each sink.

I should have remembered that. We buy white vinegar by the gallons around here -- primarily for cleaning the glass doors that pass for walls opening onto the patio.

When I was growing up, there was a household hints column in The Oregonian entitled "Hints from Heloise," filled with all kinds of wisdom about creative use of toothpaste or baking powder. I suspect white vinegar baths for blocked filters would be a perfect fit for one of her columns.

But, I guess I just played that role, didn't I?