So, today, the organization that employs me put on a fundraiser at an Italian restaurant. Everything was delicious. The crowd was emotionally moved and financially generous. The service was spectacular.

After the guests had left and the other staff and I were boxing up our banners and signs and whatnots, we were all chit chatting with the waiters as they cleared tables. Because we were picking desserts and fruits off of the leftover serving trays, we started talking about germs. Germophobes. They told stories about customers with strange requests, like only using take-out silverware and dishes. People who don't shake hands.

"Me???? I said. "My funk threshold is pretty high. I have a baby and two dogs -- I'm constantly eating hair and unidentified goo an not even batting an eye.??? Everyone agreed that yeah, they too couldn't be bothered by much in the way of food contamination. They'd eat a smashed up power bar off the floor of their car if they were hungry and stuck in traffic. Everybody, in their starving, post-presentation, cookie-vulture state thought they were pretty hardass. Unshakeable. Including me.Especially me.

Cut to 5:30, standing in my front yard on my way in from work. My saccharine-sweet next door neighbor lady comes up to the fence, and we start the neighborly chit-chat. She's older, and she worries about things that happen in the neighborhood, so we talk about that. We talk about the weather. We talk about her absolutely, one-hundred-percent fabulous flower and vegetable garden.She tells me what this flower is, and that flower, and how to turn the bulbs in the fall (spring? No, fall.) to make sure everything comes up stronger the next year. She picks up a little paper bag from her porch and heads to the vegetables, choosing her best cucumbers and tomatoes to hand over the fence to me, her dear neighbor. I thank her a million times. I ooze thanks. The conversation winds down, I start taking my little backwards steps toward my own porch, yeah, have a good night, yeah we need some rain, and then she says, "We haven't had enough rain this year, so I've been saving my bathwater to water those vegetables.???

I will repeat.

"I've been saving my bathwater to water those vegetables.???

Am I impressed with my elderly neighbor's dedication to her greenthumbery, or am I standing in my yard, repulsed and dumbfounded, holding a bag of vegetables? Vegetables that contain a lot of water? Vegetables that contain a lot of what kind of water?

I will happily eat a rasin from the bottom of my purse. But I'm stumbling over this one. Please rate, on a scale of 1-10, the level of grossness, because I can't tell if it's off the charts or if my inner germophobe is breaking out of her sterile coccoon. A little old-lady bathwater never hurt anyone, right?