If you have a pool, by now you’ve probably figured out why people who live in houses with pools say the next house won’t have one. Maintenance is a day-to-day work in progress. A large work in progress. A lot of work… In progress, always.
One of the pool owner’s least favorite tasks is sweeping down the walls. Miss a few days, and you’re likely to get a fine green coating of algae, especially when the weather’s really warm. An even less beloved job is scrubbing the tilework around the water line.
The one on the left is best.
Here’s a strategy that eliminates brushes, wands, scouring pads, and sweat. Get yourself a squirt nozzle for the garden hose—the small, nonadjustable variety that does nothing but make a hard, sharp needle-like stream. The bigger ones that adjust from a fine spray to a sidewalk-washing squirt don’t work as effectively for this job.
Attach it to the hose and turn the water on full blast. First spray off the tiles. If it’s warm enough to get into the water, drag the hose in with you, and you can actually knock off a light calcium deposit by holding the nozzle a few inches from the tile and slowly working the spray back and forth.
Then you’ll find that lo! You can easily wash the dirt and settled leaves off the steps and seat. And if you hold the nozzle parallel to the pool’s wall and swing the hose back and forth, it will wash all the dust and algae right off the wall.
A hose and spray nozzle work better for this job than a pool brush on a wand, because you can get into curves, run along the joints between the steps and the floor, and wash off the brightwork around underwater lights and ladders, the joints around the outside of water valves, and those gadgets used to hold volleyball nets.
In the summertime, you need to add water to make up for evaporation, and so washing down the walls and tile with a hose and nozzle kills two birds with one stone: you can clean and refill the pool at once. This technique gets the pool walls very, very clean, and instead of being a tedious chore, it’s actually kinda fun.
Caveat: don’t let loose of the hose inside the pool while water is running. The hose and brass nozzle will snake back and forth; if the nozzle strikes the plaster, it could cause damage. And of course, you should never let a child do this unsupervised, even one who swims well.
So Joel G and his palm tree charro showed up this morning. What a performance!
You know whatcharreada is? It’s Mexican rodeo on steroids, and uno charro is a cowboy on steroids. A really good charro is indistinguishable from his horse: when you watch such a rider, you understand where the idea of the centaur came from. The difference between a charro and a horse, far as I can tell, is that horses are crazy only part of the time. One of these guys’ entertainments, aptly named the paso de muerte, is to get a half-wild mustang flying around the perimeter of a ring, pursued by several men on horseback, and then jump from one barebacked mount onto the bare back of the reinless, frantic beast…at a dead run.
And now you know what machismo is: these characters define it.
So the palm tree guy has to climb to the top of these trees—my yard has five of them, thanks to some mindless former owner—and cut off last year’s dead growth, the six- or eight-foot-long flower stalks, and a lot of debris. To get at the stalks, he also has to remove most of the current year’s new palm fronds. In addition to being big and heavy enough to suffocate a man, these things are lined with razor-sharp thorns shaped like tiger claws. All this is done eighty feet or more off the ground. He is, in short, a man who knows no fear.
This photo’s not very good, but from the three trees in the background, you can see how tall the things are. The power lines are a block away, in La Maya’s neighborhood: my utilities are underground.
It’s a very messy job. Palm fronds, flower stalks, dirt, insects, and debris go right into the pool. Joel hauled the large stuff out of the water, but he couldn’t get all the fine dirt and litter off the bottom. So, as usual after the annual palm-tree enterprise, yesterday morning I spent six hours cleaning the pool: started at 6:00 a.m. and finished around noon. This is why I dread having the job done: that and the cost. Joel charged only $30 per tree to risk his man’s life, but what with the traffic fine, I didn’t happen to have $150 laying around in the budget this month. Click on this photo twice to see all the chaff that’s flying out of the tree as el charro works on it.
I did make an interesting discovery: a garden hose with a high-pressure squirter on it does a mighty fine job of cleaning tiles. The alkalinity in the pool’s water is too high, and so calcium deposits are growing on the tilework. At the same time, I’m told the pH is too low to add more acid (don’t ask! I took high-school chemistry, too, and I don’t get it either). So the tiles have to be cleaned a couple times a week, which is a job. Yesterday I really didn’t want to get into the dirty water to scrub down the debris-coated tiles, so it occurred to me to squirt them off. Lo! The white crud squirts off, too! I couldn’t believe it. Not only that, but the pressurized water rinses algae and dirt off the pool walls, especially in places I can’t easily reach with the pool brush, and bats it right out of the inlets, outlets, light frame, and gadgets for attaching a volleyball net. This is going to make my life 100 percent easier.
Transplanted a pretty little vitex tree that volunteered some years ago and has outgrown its pot. I hope this will make a nice patio tree one day, or possibly a landscape item for the downtown house. It makes a beautiful deep-blue blossom and can grow into a lovely tree. The one in my front yard is getting pretty big.
At the Safeway, they were selling chuck roasts for a glorious $1.27 a pound! I grabbed five pounds and had it ground for me and the Corgi. Cooked up a magnificent hamburger spiked with feta cheese—excellent barbecue combination! Wrap the burger around the feta, grill to your satisfaction over charcoal and, if available, hickory chips. Awesome!
After all the banging and crashing with the palm tree cutting and the pool cleaning, along about 5:30 in the evening the phone rings and voilà, there’s Gerardo! He’s lleno de disculpas for not having called: no, he hasn’t fallen out of a palm tree. He took his family to San Diego. They stayed for a week with a brother-in-law and had a great time. He was sorry not to have taken after the palm trees this week (Gerardo, being mas hombre than Joel, does not hire a guy to do this job: he climbs up in there and has at it himself, leaving one of his half-wit flunkies on the ground to do the clean-up). So, he wants to meet and talk about landscaping M’hijito’s digs this afternoon.
To top off the day, Her Deanship’s secretary called mid-afternoon, trying to summon me to the Presence. I was forced to admit that Macavity wasn’t there…now I’m supposed to show up over there this morning.
Some Blogger sites refuse to recognize my existence in any permutation, and Chance’s is one of them. So I’ll try just adding my two cents here:
Back in the Cretaceous, we had shampoo but no one shampooed every day. We didn’t have conditioners of the sort available today—to get rid of the frizzies and tear-jerking tangles, we used this pink liquid (don’t recall the brand name) that you squirted on with a pump sprayer and combed through your hair. While it did get rid of mare’s nests and static fly-away, it left your hair kinda limp.
In the absence of hand-held blow dryers, washing your hair was a major project: you had to set your hair with bobby pins (twisting little pincurls allll over your head!) or, in later years, with rollers, and then you either slept in them overnight or you sat under a bonnet dryer for anywhere between one and three hours, depending on how long and thick your hair was.
Women in recent years have been bamboozled into dousing their heads with various chemical brews every day, when really it’s not necessary. One’s hair did start to get a little greasy-looking after a week, but the truth is most women’s hair can go for three days or so before really needing to be washed.
In the past, I’ve used Neutrogena bar soap on my hair. It’s a little harsh, but it will get your hair clean. I found it drying, and if you get the stuff in your eyes it hurts like the dickens…probably not a good sign. Baby shampoo works quite effectively on women’s hair and is pretty mild. Like grown-up shampoos, it contains many ingredients straight out of a chemistry lab.
Hair conditioner alone can be substituted for shampoo, at least for a few washings. It tends to build up in the hair like liquid fabric softener in the washer, not surprising since we’ve discovered that you can use hair conditioner in place of fabric softener. Here in the Southwest, ordinary bar soap makes a mess of your hair, because most areas have pretty hard water. This can be ameliorated to some degree by rinsing with diluted vinegar or lemon juice.
I’ve also used dish detergent in a pinch. It works exactly like shampoo, with exactly the same results…not surprising, since shampoo is your basic detergent. Clear Ivory dish detergent behaves just like shampoo, except at the cash register.
It’ll be interesting to see how Chance makes out with the baking soda-&-vinegar treatment. If you could use that on your hair and olive oil on your face, you’d go a long way toward breaking the grip of the cosmetics industry on women’s everyday lives.
A fine young locksmith I met a few weeks ago came up with an idea that might help protect my priceless valuables from the wave of burglaries the neighborhood is enjoying. I’d asked him if he felt installing (ugg-leeee!) steel security doors was worth the extravagant cost, and he said all a burglar needs is a crowbar to bust through one of the things. He suggested instead that you install a sturdy solid-core door on your home office or a bedroom and put a good strong deadbolt on the thing. Put your computers and whatever else you cherish in the room, and then treat its door like any exterior door: lock it before you leave the house.
He also recommended bolting a fireproof, burglar-proof safe to the floor in the same room, to keep your papers, jewelry, and pistols. You should, of course, have a gun safe for any long guns you choose to keep.
Lowe’s sells solid-core interior doors for under $200. A double security door to protect even one of the three sliding doors in back would run me over $1,000. Truth to tell, I own little of value; the only thing I’d rather not have stolen is the computer, which contains my entire life. A few negotiable instruments and my father’s Ruger also could stay, if the burglar wouldn’t mind too much.
The Lowe’s door guy pointed out that even a solid-core door is vulnerable a vigorous kicking job. The locksmith extraordinaire counter-pointed out that to break through a solid-core door with a heavy-duty deadbolt and a heavy-duty strike with extra-long bolts extending into the studs would at least give the burglar a sprained ankle.
So this morning I ordered the door; this afternoon the Lowe’s guy came by to measure; tomorrow morning I’ll run past the locksmith’s to buy his version of a killer deadbolt. For less than a fourth of what one double security door would cost, I’ll get some modest protection for the office. The room fronts to the street, and a fiercely thorny rose bush grows under the window, so it’s unlikely the burglar will try to get in that way. The window has some serious security on it, anyhow.
Of late, our burglars have been a real squat-and-run set. They watch until they see someone leave, then they jump the back wall and break in a back door, race through the place in ten or fifteen minutes, and are outta there. Because they know it takes the cops about that long to get here, they move very fast. So there’s a good chance that a tough lock and a reasonably resistant solid-core door will discourage them.
Many of us have begun making laundry soap with Fels Naptha soap, borax, and washing soda. If you’re doing that, please take a look at what’s in Fels Naptha soap. Turns out the stuff contains mineral spirits, a petroleum product. It can be highly irritating and apparently should not be used as a regular laundry additive.
Several bloggers have reported good results using ordinary bath soap, such as Ivory. See, for example, Thrifty Fun, Little House in the Suburbs, and The Simple Dollar, among others. Whichever bar soap you decide to use, be careful when grinding it in a food processor. Some soaps can throw off fine dust when processed, which will fly up into your face when you open the machine’s lid. Avoid breathing the stuff, either by waiting a while before opening the food processor or at least by keeping your face a good long way back from the machine.
Hey! Here’s a little discovery: hair conditioner works in the laundry just like fabric softener!
I’ve always disliked fabric softener, because it gums up the washer (or dryer, if it comes in the form of dryer sheets) and because IMHO it smells ungodly awful. I really, really, really dislike industrial-strength perfumes. Weirdly, I want my wash to smell clean, not like some chemist’s idea of what some vague consumer imagines stinks pretty. So, as you might surmise, I don’t keep any of the gunk on hand.
Cassie the Corgi, a furry little character, sleeps on the bed on top of two throws, laid over the blankets to collect her hair. And collect hair they do!
Washing the doggy bedding often doesn’t get all the hair out. Then the throws get staticky in the washer, and the darned dog hair glues itself to the fabric. Sunday afternoon the throws were especially furry; two turns through the washer and dryer did nothing to remove the dog hair. Called La Maya to see if I could mooch a dryer sheet; no answer. The second-to-last thing I wanted to do was buy a package of fabric softener gunk that I’ll never use; last thing was to sleep with bedding that stinks of industrial chemicals. {gag!}
After much cerebration, the light finally dawned: Hair conditioner works very much like fabric softener. One of the things it’s supposed to do is defuse static in your long, flowing locks. And because I buy the mildest-smelling hair products I can find, the stuff in my shower doesn’t stink!
So I poured about an eighth of a cup of Kirkland’s best into the washer with the doggy throws. And darned if it didn’t work! Between the washer and the dryer, almost all the magnetic dog hair rinsed or shook out.
Turns out I’m not the first to think of this. E-how recommends diluting hair conditioner 1:10 and using it just like fabric softener. Experience shows this is a good plan: dumping it in undiluted left some blobs on the throws, so I had to run them through the rinse cycle a second time.
Another site, Creative Homemaking, suggests working a tablespoon of hair conditioner into a damp washrag and tossing it into the dryer, just like a fabric softener sheet.
A third idea, which is all over the Web, proposes that the happy homemaker toss a wadded-up ball of aluminum foil into the dryer with the clothing. I could find only one person reporting that this didn’t work. I haven’t tried it, but I may in the future. Doesn’t look like it would do any harm, anyway. One possible problem with hair conditioner is that if fabric softener gums up your washer or your dryer, hair conditioner may do the same. Tinfoil presumably wouldn’t do that.
