With the interwoven challenges of heat and roommates, our daily life continued on. For several weeks during the summer our Internet kept coming and going. When we rely so much on its easy accessibility (research, online bill-paying, bank reconciliations, communicating with others), being without it is very frustrating. After getting totally fed up with frequent annoying fixes that never seemed to last, Chelsea finally called the modem company. Turns out that the software on the modem needed to be updated, which Chelsea was able to do over the phone, and voila – no more difficulties. What a relief…
Interspersed with the Internet annoyance was trying to fix our washer (it stopped mid-wash one day in early July). With four of us in the household and a lot of laundry, that was definitely a hassle! We ordered a new timer and learned how to install it, but no luck. Knowing that any other fixes would likely cost as much as a new washer, I looked on Craigslist and found a perfect candidate for replacing our old washer. Alex agreed to pay the $150 asking price, we called, and within two hours the sellers had delivered it to our door, set it up, and took our old one. We now have a washer that is only about a year old, the same make and style as our old one, but much, much nicer. After a month of hassle and hand-washing our clothing, we are incredibly appreciative every time we use it…
Alex was here until mid-August, fooling around as he so often does. He frequently picks Chelsea up and carries her around (laughing) as she twists and writhes to get down; one day he put her up on his shoulders and carried her around the house, ducking under doorways. Her “terror” was hilarious; check out our photo gallery for some photos.
Another time he took the whipped cream out of the refrigerator, told her to close her eyes and open her mouth, then proceed to blast the whipped cream into her mouth. I shouldn’t have laughed, as it only encouraged him; Chelsea ended up with whipped cream all over her face. Thank heaven Chelsea didn’t go for revenge; we’d have had quite a mess to clean up. Chelsea was glad it was only whipped cream.
One really wonderful evening Alex breezed in through the door at 8 p.m. carrying a bag of groceries and announced he was cooking dinner for us. That’s always a treat as Alex is an incredibly good cook – at the ripe old age of four years old he’d sit watching a full hour’s cooking show. It somehow translated into current talent. Dinner was just amazing – linguine with parmesan pesto rosemary chicken and steamed broccoli; we even watched Definitely Maybe together as we ate (great movie!).
Our pool has continued to be a saga. After getting the chemicals straightened out, we discovered that we had a black algae bloom (apparently along with half the pools in South Florida). We scrubbed, vacuumed, chlorinated, cleaned the filters every other day – all with no noticeable success. Then Terry at Pinch A Penny looked at our water composition and pointed out that our very high dissolved solids would cause all our problems.
The only cure for total dissolved solids is to drain the pool and add fresh water. It took us two days to drain the pool halfway; we had to run quickly to Pinch A Penny to borrow a pump on day two. We kept having rainstorms and the pump couldn’t be out in the rain, so we’d run out to put the pump in, run out to pull it out, run back to put it in…
Since the water was so low when we finished, Chelsea decided to hand scrub the pool sides and floor with a stainless steel brush – it removes the crusty exterior on the black algae. The sides looked beautiful, as did the shallow end, when she finished those areas. By the time she reached the deeper end, she needed her snorkel goggles to dive down and scrub underwater.
By this time Chelsea was getting quite tired – it’s hard work – think of vigorously scrubbing a very large room, underwater. We did want to finish, as we’d had the pool without any filtration for almost three days. The day was getting hotter and hotter and hotter, and Chelsea was in the direct sun. And worse, she had to expend the energy to kick her way down to the bottom, scrub furiously, come up for air, then kick her way down again.
Our solution was unique but effective. I grabbed our navy-blue Tommy Bahama patio umbrella with its aluminum pole and hopped into the pool next to Chelsea. I stuck the umbrella pole down the length of my blue water shorts to help balance it, held onto the pole with one hand while using the other hand to hang on to the pool edge, and used my foot to push Chelsea down to the bottom, holding her there while she scrubbed.
It must have been hilarious to watch us…but hey, it worked really well. Chelsea didn’t have to expend nearly so much energy, which meant she got more done in a shorter time, we were both out of the burning direct sun, and the pool sure looked better. Right when Chelsea was ready to give up, we were driven inside by thunderstorms. We called a halt to pool scrubbing and starting refilling. Chelsea had a few tough hours though, later that day, in getting her breathing back to normal. Her brain kept thinking she was underwater, so she’d forget to inhale. Glad she got over that.
Our pool now looks far better, though. We still have to deal with the remains of the black algae, but we know what to do, and we’ve been chunking away at the remaining steps to achieve total eradication. Meanwhile we’ve been thoroughly enjoying the swimming.
It’s South Florida, so anything can happen with pools, besides black algae. Sure enough, we’ve had a few interesting visitors the last couple of months. Early in June we found another baby possum, but this guy was unlucky – we found him dead in our skimmer basket. We’ve since found at least two baby Florida Scarlet snakes and a baby softshell turtle. We managed to rescue the snakes and the turtle before they met an untimely death. Check out our photos of Chelsea in her scrubbing mode and of our little visitors.
Though we haven’t had much time to watch movies in several months, we did get Season One of the TV show Castle (Jo Ann in Oak Grove, LA introduced us to Castle while we stayed with her in spring of 2009), and watched it beginning to end. Chelsea and I read many mysteries, so we love the basis of the show. We’re now partway through Season 2.
Another treat was Ladies #1 Detective Agency, the series of books by Alexander McCall Smith. We have loved the books ever since they first came out, so we were concerned about watching a television series based on our much loved books, given how rarely movies/television and books line up. Only one season was made, but we loved it, and we hope another director takes over the remaining books and does as good a job as this one did!
Alex continues to do well at his job, though the hours and stress are getting to him, we think. A few months ago he won $100 in another upsell contest at work (he won a 32” Toshiba color TV a few months back). After he won this latest contest, another server was heard to say “Why don’t you just ask Alex what he wants next time and skip the hassle of the contest?”
One of our last big projects is trimming our trees and taking down three trees killed by Hurricane Wilma. We are concerned about leaving them up and having them fall on the house or become flying objects in a bad storm. Part of one dead palm in front already collapsed after several days of soaking rains and fell on Tyler’s roof. We’re expecting major storms this week, in fact, tomorrow night. The storms are predicted to produce heavy rains, so we’re crossing our fingers that we escape winds.
(Update: the storm turned out to be a non-issue for us. And even better, two friends came over a few weekends ago to spend an afternoon taking down the dead trees and doing all the necessary tree trimming. The yard looks great and we have no more worries about trees and power lines and damaged roofs.)
It’s astonishing how much house maintenance is required to keep things looking good and working well…