1 Actually, we use one of those Pur ^TM  water filter thingies where you fill the "box" every night so you have nice clean water to make coffee with and to take your pills with in the morning. We have a water softener (just about everyone's home does, although I understand some cities' municipal water supplies take care of that themselves). Our rig takes out most of the salt from the softener.

Bottled water? You gotta be kidding! Look for example at Evian brand, and see what it spells backward. 'Nuff said!

No, I know what you're saying. We came to Minnesota too late for whatever's in the water to affect us, from a political point of view.

2 Dana, Evian is a waste of money but in places like Florida where the water at least used to taste like it came out of the ocean I'd shell out for it rather than drink tap. I'm fortunate; St. Louis actually sets it's water standards for Ahheuser Busch and so we have excellent city tap water. And since it comes right out of the Mississippi river our water treatment plants are second to none in teh world. We have excellent water, although it is a bit hard and we go through a lot of toilet flaps as a result.

I remember being a kid and visiting Biloxi Ms. and the water smelled and tasted like rotten eggs! Don't know if that's still the case but it was back then.

St. Louis wasn't always this way; my grandfather told me the tap water used to be brown and nonody would drink it. That was when they used to have to pump the water up into water towers for pressure. We still have several really picturesque water towers around town. I knew a guy who actually bought one and lives in it; there is a large underground area where he resides.

I suspect you DID arrive late enough for whatever is turning your neighbors into morons to affect you. Don't know what Illinois' problem is - or Wisconsin.

3 Our water comes out of the Mississippi too. I don't know how much treatment it needs before being delivered to customers. I don't know how hard it is; I could check and see what it says on our water softener sometime; I remember doing that years ago when our landlady had our softener replaced, and I checked with the town (the Internet is good for a lot of things). People were setting theirs at a default setting which was higher than needed, and I figured why use more salt than necessary.

Somebody told me, erroneously, that I could save salt by setting it to get my water "a little harder." Not so; a water softener is a bang-bang device: you set it to get soft water, and if you set it lower it just runs out of soft water before the next recharge.