So Stupendous Pool Dude’s plan to de-haze the pool seems to be working. His strategy entails pouring vast quantities of liquid chlorine into the drink, keeping the chlorine levels at “5” for a couple of days and holding the pH up, whilst running the pump through the main drain, which he believes will circulate more water faster than the usual set-up, wherein water is pulled through the skimmer.
Today the water stayed fairly clear all day, throughout some of the hottest hours we’ve had this summer. Usually by the time the sun hits that water at mid-morning, the thing is London Fog.
Right now a storm is blowing in, complete with light show. That will blow large quantities of debris into the thing, which, since the strategy involves running the pump all day and all night, is likely to get sucked into the drain. I’m not going out there and shutting off the motor, partly because I do not wish to be electrocuted by a random lightning bolt and partly because I’m so tired I expect to be asleep by the time this storm ends, not out there skimming off the surface in the dark.
There is, after all, a limit.
Picked up another eight gallons of chlorine at the Depot today, four of which I’ve dumped into the drink. The chlorine level was down to nil this morning, and by 5:00 p.m. it had dropped back down from 5 to a little under 1 (read: almost absent).
That is an excessive amount of chlorine to dump into the water. However, if his theory is right, the water contains an excessive amount of microbes, which bloom into foggy life the minute the sun wakes them up.
SPD gazed critically upon a large brownish area on the floor of the deep end. He thought it was dirt. I said no, I believed it to be a discoloration caused by the large amounts of granulated chlorine I’d already dumped into the pool: this stuff settles to the bottom and discolors the spectacularly expensive PebbleSheen. He seemed to accept this.
But…
At the Depot this afternoon, I found and picked up a type of pool brush that combines nylon with stainless steel bristles. This is supposed to work better on the damned PebbleSheen, which is virtually impossible to clean. It literally eats up your nylon pool brush.
When I got it home and tried it out in the deep end, I found that yes: it did roil up the brown stuff and fluff it into the water. The gunk probably is a combination of dust and algae.
But I couldn’t scrub it off the bottom very efficiently. I simply don’t have the physical strength to make a pool brush work against that impossible PebbleSheen stuff. If the pool is to be cleaned adequately, I’m going to have to hire a young man or (preferably) a teenaged kid to wrangle that job.
And…just as I was leaving the pool department, what should I spot but…hallelujah, brothers and sisters! A LEAF VAC WITH THE OLD DESIGN THAT ACTUALLY WORKS!
Leslie’s has replaced its old leaf vac model with a piece of junk that is so bad their staff actually tells customers not to buy it. The redesigned it and in doing so produced an item that does not work. Period. The one at Home Depot — a different brand — still has the same old structure around the bottom and the wheels, and still has the same old style of hose connection. Those changes inflicted on the Leslie’s version are, I believe, what cause the thing not to work. The HD model, with what looks very much like design identical to the old, functioning leaf vac, should do the job.
I certainly hope so, because come tomorrow morning there will be plenty of debris in the pool for it to vacuum up!
Okay, I’ve either come unstuck in time or I’ve come unstuck in space. Or from reality. Quite possibly, in reality we live in some imagined dystopia, more horrible than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell or even Mitch McConnell could dream up for us.
The morning started with an unplanned appointment. I’d left despairing word on the voicemail of the supposed Stupendous Pool Dude favored by WonderAccountant and Mr. WonderAccountant. SPD only noticed my plaintive cry for help along about 6 this morning. He called to reply while I was in the backyard wrestling (again…still) with the damned pool and thinking it’s time to seriously consider filling the thing in and replacing it with a nice, big shade tree.
I call him back and he says “I’m on my way.” And he shows up here at 7 a.m.
Most of what he had to say was nothing new. Nevertheless, taken together his advice may prove helpful. One can always hope…
After much testing, discussing, and thinking, the old fella (he IS an old fella! been doing this for a LONG time) opined as follows:
The pool renovation dudes had indeed applied a stabilizer when they refilled the pool; the CYA levels are good.
Nevertheless, the pH is out of whack (no shit, Jose?)
This was likely caused by the use of granulated chlorine, which is highly acetic. Use that only to shock-treat, not for day-to-day chlorination.
Running the pool cleaner off the skimmer inlet rather than through the new port in the side of the pool is problematic; it dampens the speed with which the water can be recirculated, plus he truly hates it that the thing pulls debris into the pump-pot strainer basket.
Better circulation can be acquired by setting the thing to pull water through the main drain, which will move the water faster and should help to filter out the haze-making stuff, which he suspects is bacterial rather than algal.
The chlorine was just OK as of 7 a.m., but that was only because a half-hour earlier I’d poured in my last half-gallon of liquid chlorine.
Harvey might work better with a shorter length of hosing…
He sprinkled in another four or five pounds of soda ash. This brought the pH level up into the “ideal” range, and he said to keep applying liquid Cl a couple times a day. (So that means, oh hooray, I get to traipse to Home Depot between the lunch-time confab with VickyC and her collaborator in the nonprofit biz and the 4:00 p.m. spree with WonderAccountant that I’m committed to. Wheee!)
Shovel him out the door. Write a list of the 87 gerjillion things I have to do between the 11 a.m. meeting and the 4 p.m. meeting. Fly around trying to clean up, paint the face, disguise the hair, and throw on some socially acceptable clothing. Shoot out the door just in time to get to Windsor on Central, the designated restaurant meeting place.
I’m the first to arrive, a bit before the appointed hour. Get a booth. Order up some iced tea. Peruse the menu.
This is a trendy restaurant with trendy prices.
Soup: $4 for a measly cup; $7 for a bowl
Salads: $11 – $11.50
Sandwiches and hamburgers: $13 to $15.50
Hors d’oeuvres (called “starters” because apparently younger restauranteurs and their customers can neither spell nor pronounce the actual word): $11 – $15
Full meals: $15 to $19.75
Plus tax. Plus tip.
Yeah. Don’t s’ppose they have a side of onion rings? No. Of course not. 😀
So I figure I’ll have a $7 (plus tax, plus tip) bowl of soup for lunch. And I wait for the others to show up.
And wait. And wait. And wait…
By about the third wait, my ears are hurting seriously. WHAT is with the current fad for blasting restaurant patrons with loud, nerve-jangling, conversation-negating noise? Wherever you go these days, you get blasted with some excruciating excuse for music, which usually entails one or more performers screaming. And why do people persist in going to restaurants whose proprietors bombard them with ear-splitting, unpleasant noise? And who persuaded otherwise sane businessmen and women that this racket is music? Or Muzak?
It’s not just loud and unharmonic and ugly. It’s gutter “music.” It’s some guy shouting about his cocaine use to a gut-banging background thump.
Dude! I don’t care about your cocaine habit! And I especially don’t care to have it shoved in my face while I’m trying to eat my $7 bowl of soup or my $20 hamburger.
Fifteen or twenty minutes into the wait, I can stand it no longer. I get up and leave.
Is it because I am old, I wonder? Do I think rap is ugly, is not music, is antithetical to a decent (expensive!) meal because I am old, passé, and out of it? Really?
What was trendy when we were pups? Northern Italian. For sure. Nothing would do but veal scallopini. Food was about the same: trendily stylish. Tasted about the same as the stuff you get now: restaurant food has always tasted pretty uniformly the same from one establishment to the next. That has not changed.
So what was the difference? Ambience-wise: instead of annoying loud music, you got annoying echoes rattling around a hard-surfaced cave-like interior. And yes, that racket tended to drown out conversation, too. Food-wise: though it was largely supplemented by pasta, most of the cuisine did not appear to have come out of a box, a can, or a bag.
My parents would have been capable of enjoying a Northern Italian-style restaurant of the early 1970s, even though they wouldn’t have appreciated the echo effect. It would, however, not have been their preference.
What was trendy when they were pups? Red velvet wallpaper with mahogany trim. White tablecloths. Muted lighting. And beef. A lot of beef. Roast beef. Grilled steaks of various grades. Stewed beef. Casseroled beef. Beef chili. A fair amount of potatoes accompanied these fine dishes. And coffee: they drank coffee with dinner instead of wine.
After what I felt was altogether too long a wait for my mysteriously absent friends, I concluded that…
I had the wrong day…
Or I had the wrong time…
Or I had the wrong place…
And I certainly had the wrong purveyor of Muzak. Out the door, into the accursed Venza, and down the road with me!
From there it was up to Home Depot, there to purchase eight gallons of liquid chlorine, which should tide the pool over for something like four to six days. Grabbed a few sundries, shot out the door, stopped by the Walmart long enough to grab a bag of bird seed to tide the doves over until 40 pounds of seed arrive from Amazon. Sailed home.
Dumped another half-gallon of the chlorine into the pool. Observed that it still looked very hazy.
Poured a bourbon and water. Threw a mahi steak on the grill along with an ear of sweet corn. Consumed this with half an avocado, a handful of campari tomatoes, and a glass of wine.
Another couple of hours have passed. The pool looks like it’s beginning to clear. The heat is weirdly miserable, inexplicably: it’s only 109 out there, which is just not all that hot. But for some reason it feels almost as excruciating as cocaine-obsessed rap.
Now I have about 15 minutes before I have to get dressed again, this time to visit a favorite hangout with WonderAccountant, where we are determined to cool off with Margaritas, guacamole, and chips.
Welp, I’m on my way…first to a hair appointment of long standing, and second to the Mayo, where they urgently wish to see me. Looks like the clindamycin is, as I tried to tell the endodontist, indeed very possibly causing a fine case of C. difficile. So it’s off to their acute care section, where I have to be at 2:40. It’s an hour’s drive, and I have to be at the hair guy at 1 p.m. So…40 minutes to Shane, another 40 minutes from his place to the Mayo…should work out just about right…
ugh. Just what I wanna do with a nice, humid 112-degree afternoon.
***
Like a rocket, straight across the city to lovely Olde Towne Scottsdale!…
Well… More like a mule and a flatboard…
So here I am at the hair stylist’s, about 10 minutes early. He’s still eating his lunch. Appointment isn’t until 1:00, but fortunately, suspecting the usual worst, I left 50 minutes beforehand.
***
Yea verily, as usual in lovely Phoenix, wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here. Hence, almost an hour to make a twenty-five-minute drive was cutting it close. No sooner do I turn out of the Hood onto Main Drag East than I spot emergency lights flashing at the Desired Intersection, about a mile & a half down the road.
Dayum! think I: Wrecky-poo. Better turn left at First Intersection so as to dodge that mess.
Weirdly, there is exactly no traffic on Main Drag East. This is one of the mainest of main drags in the city. During the noon hour, lots of my fellow homicidal drivers should be dodging up and down it. Nary a soul.
So I get into the left turn lane and hope for a break in the traffic on Main Drag South, enough for me do dodge suicidally onto M.D. South, eastbound. From there it will be all the way to 12th Street and then down to Glendale, which turns into Lincoln Blvd, which will take me to Goldwater Drive, which turns into Scottsdale Road, which deposits me at Shane’s salon.
Cross-traffic on M.D. East is heavy. A cop pulls up and parks on someone’s yard, and I think Ah! He’ll direct traffic and let me turn left. No. He never gets out of his car.
So naturally I dodge suicidally in front of the Oncoming, make it onto the eastbound arterial, and fly away.
Maneuver down to Glendale, past closed stores and a bum sleeping on the sidewalk, driving driving driving.
At 24th Street our honored City Parents have Glendale/Lincoln CLOSED DOWN TO ONE LANE while they excavate the road.
Mile on mile on mile of road. Lincoln is restricted from 24th Street all the way to Tatum Blvd. This is, says Google Maps, only three miles, but when you’re puttering along at under 25 mph while you try to get to an appointment on time, it feels like about 30 miles.
Water line replacement.
I do not know why it is that wherever I’m goin’ they have the roads torn up, wrecks littering the landscapes, crazies banging around, ambulances and cops tearing back and forth…but it never, ever fails.
***
Oh well. I make it to Shane’s place. He does a beautiful and expensive job on my long flowing locks, chatting all the time. His brother died, sadly enough. Colon cancer. The guy lived homeless in the woods outside Flagstaff, his schizophrenia making the sound of human company an agonizing distraction.
Shane has one last photo of his brother, the two of them posing together. What a strange and heart-breaking contrast: Shane handsome, healthy and vigorous; Bob tired, gaunt, and streetworn.
***
From Shane’s it’s up to the Mayo Clinic, where I have an appointment a scant hour and a half after the hair get-together. This, arranged on the fly along about 9 this morning.
For the third day in a row, I have runaway diarrhea. And if you read the flyer and the online material for clindamycin, you see that clindamycin is associated with Clostridium difficile infections, and that often this comes within a few months of taking it. So…it’s tiiime!
Heavy traffic on Scottsdale Road, but not bad eastbound, halfway to Payson, and into the Mayo.
So here I am… Just talked to the cutest young doctor in training. He thinks it’s not C. diff but more likely a passing virus; maybe a bacterial infection. He thinks it’ll go away in a few days.
Let us hope so!
Doc-in-Training’s boss doctor comes in, a middle-aged soul who has the look of a person who has absorbed considerable acquired wisdom during her life. She also opines that I do not have C. diff, and reels off a number of good reasons. She offers to do a test. I say if she feels confident that this is really just a passing minor bug, then in my opinion less is more. She inclines to agree. I am out the door.
Now I have to get home. How to avoid whatever that was, if it’s still there. Three hours (plus) have passed, so presumably the mess, signal outage, whatEVER is gone by now. But if not..,.
Ah yes, if not…by the time I get there it will be High Rush Hour. Rush hour starts at 3:00 in these fine parts. That’ll add a mess to a mess.
***
Driving driving driving back through central Scottsdale, reflecting that the stores and malls there have hardly changed since my friends and I were in graduate school and this was our stomping ground. What has changed was the tract where my best friend B and her husband bought a little (tackily tossed-together) house on a big chunk of horse property. The structure was so cheaply built that you could see the sky where the living-room window didn’t fit the frame. The builder hadn’t even bothered to fill the gap with putty.
Shortly, she divorced her husband of the moment, mostly – truth be known – because at the time she took up with him, she was playing at being countercultural…but he really was countercultural. Alas, at heart, countercultural was not her game; under the long straight hair and the stylishly hippy clothes, she was a nice middle-class bourgeoise. When it occurred to her that he was getting more and more like his father (a dyed-in-the-wool eccentric) and that she did not want to be like his mother (to whom it fell to support the father and their three children), she flang him out.
She ended up (how, I do not know) with the house, and the debt associated therewith.
Now comes the amazing part…
Not very long after the break-up, along came a real estate developer. He wanted to buy up all the properties in that tract so he could convert the land into a shopping mall. A freeway – now known as the Pima Freeway or Loop 101 – was on the drawing board, and so the proposed mall promised to be profitable.
B refused to sell.
The developer was uncowed. He came back with new offers…the most attractive of which was “how’s about I buy you another house?”
She said, “I might consider that. But only if my mortgage payments remain the same. And it needs to have lots of space between me and the neighbors.”
Incredibly, the guy finds her a place on what was then the eastern edge of Scottsdale on over an acre of land, with a desert wash running along the back property line – adding another good 30 feet of width. The house was about 2900 well-built, handsomely equipped square feet. Basically what he did was give her a very fine home in one of the most desirable parts of Scottsdale, for the cost of the piece of junk she was living in.
She lived happily ever after there, working away as a college professor. Recently she retired, and she and her second husband sold the place for $737,620, just about enough to buy in the Pacific Northwest, whither they decamped.
***
Sailing homeward across the Valley on Shea Boulevard, I encountered traffic that was thick, heavy, but moving. Hit the freeway and you get the aggressive demented idiots, people who try to pass you on the right shoulder when you’re tailgating the guy who’s moving up the onramp ahead of you. Luckily, I also am aggressive and demented, and so in response to one of these this afternoon, closed the six or eight feet between myself and the guy ahead of me to four or five feet, fuckyouverymuch Jerkowitz.
***
So now it’s 4:19 and the Human has just made it into the Funny Farm. The light at the entrance to the ’Hood was functioning, but while I was gone, the City shut down a lane coming and a lane going, indicating that we will have to use Gangbanger’s Way for ingress and egress while they dig up the road, if we are to avoid yet another interminable traffic jam.
Literally. The Fourth scored a chilly 104 here in lovely uptown Phoenix. This afternoon it was 108, sez Wunderground. The pool is more like a bathtub than a swimming pool…especially saturated with algaecide, which creates bubbles!
Aaron the Pool Dude’s discovery that the pump was partially jammed with a chunk of palm tree debris seems to have largely solved the London Fog problem. The water has hovered between clear and crystal clear since he fixed that. The problem right now is that it is demanding SO much liquid chlorine that I fail to see how I’m going to be able to afford to maintain our present scheme. Yesterday it consumed a full gallon of chlorine — put in half a gallon in the morning and by mid-day it was just about out. Dumped the other half-gallon in, and by this morning it needed another hit.
I can’t afford to pour a gallon of chlorine in there every day…not at six bucks a gallon. So we need to find some way to stabilize the chemicals. Meanwhile, I have other fish to fry…
And we do mean fry. Today I had to schlep, once again, over to the far west side through the sizzling heat, there to visit the dermatologist again. Her crew thinks it’s too soon to tell whether the most recent little procedure failed (as I think it did) to get rid of a budding skin tumor. They recommended massaging antibiotic ointment into it.
Hm. Never occurred to me to massage a wound. But in fact, it worked, and promptly. It’s already feeling a little better and looking a lot better.
Finally managed to extract a prescription for some goop to whiten the brown spots all over my face. That, she called in to the Costco pharmacy. Schlepping way to hell and gone down there through the unholy heat was more than I could face, so that will have to wait until I can get into Costco for a regular shopping run.
Maybe later.
Tomorrow I have to traipse almost as far in the opposite direction, to the hair stylist in Scottsdale.
The effort to find someone closer and cheaper failed. I couldn’t even figure out how to get in the beauty school’s front door: apparently they’re closed to the public. So went across the street to the beauty salon in the run-down Albertson’s shopping center.
LOL! “Run-down” doesn’t describe it. Would you go for dark? How about dank? Decided against making an appointment there.
Helle’s Belle’s. Even though Shane is spectacularly expensive, with my hair halfway to my fanny I only need a trim once or twice a year. I can afford sixty bucks, at that rate. His salon is beautiful…and so is he. And he does a reliably excellent job.
So…in short: I have gotten nothing done today except running around through the heat and dumping chlorine bleach into the swimming pool. Whee!
And that was before I dumped in the recommended two gallons of liquid chlorine.
Aaron, the swim-pool dude, recommends that we drain and refill the pool because of the high phosphate levels. This will be another expensive endeavor, especially if we do it in the summer. In the past, the City of Phoenix, which dispenses water here, used to give you a special break on the price if you had to drain your pool, not something one wants to do. In the 16 years I’ve been in this house, the pool has been drained only three times. and the last time was so as to resurface the shell.
Water bills here can be higher than utility bills, which are bracing. The city jacks up its rates during the summer, which it bases on the amount you use during the winter. So the more water you use in the winter, the more they shaft you in the summer, when you most need the water to keep your yard alive, to run (energy efficient!) evap coolers, and to replace water evaporating from the pool.
Note that of late the City has taken to adding phosphates to the drinking water, by way of lubricating their equipment. This, rather than the untrimmed palm trees, explains why the phosphate levels have been so elevated.
Since I live on a flat amount per annum, and since I had to pull down the amount needed for the resurfacing job from savings, there’s no way in Hell I can afford to drain and refill the pool now. So it appeared we were looking at just accepting murky water until about next November. Thankyouverymuch, honored City Fathers.
As you can imagine, then, I was thrilled to walk out there this afternoon and find the drain covers in the deep end clearly and crisply visible.
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
Apparently when Aaron pulled out the piece of palm-tree debris he found blocking the pump’s innards, he fixed the problem.
😀
I suspected something was wrong with the equipment but thought the issue was with the filter, not with the pump…though it must be said the thing was running with a slightly labored sound. Now it sounds fine, and it seems to be working fine.
The prospect of essentially shock-treating the pool with liquid Cl gave me some pause — two gallons is a lot. However, the water is extremely warm. Chlorine is burning off within hours — it was well into the “ideal” range at 11:00 this morning, but by 7:00 this evening was essentially absent. Had about the same chlorine level as the tap water.
We shall see, then, what the upshot is tomorrow. The Leslie’s guy says adding chlorine causes cloudiness. I’ve found the opposite to be the case, but some say shock-treating can cloud the water. If that’s the case, though, it should clear by mid-day, which is about how long a heavy dose of chlorine survives at this time of year.
So the Swimming Pool Service and Repair Dude arrived, as arranged, along about mid-morning. What a nice man!
Hmmm… Suppose we could get cuteness PLUS bottled water?
He discovered a clog in the pump motor, which he fixed. And he opined that the clouding problem had to do with the use of too much granulated chlorine (no!!!! Use liquid chlorine!!!) and with the high phosphate levels in the water. And he revealed that, astonishingly, the city has been adding phosphates to the water supply, the theory being that the stuff lubricates their machinery.
Uh-HUH.
Makes bottled water look pretty good, doesn’t it…
Shortly I got distracted with the important business of the day — to wit, loafing — and so did not run right out there with the two bottles of liquid Cl I happen to have laying around.
And now, along about 1:30, I venture out into the ungodly heat with the uncrated bottles of chlorine in hand, only to find that…gosh! The water is one WHOLE helluva lot clearer. In the famed ungodly heat (which usually induces clouding), the water is freaking clearing up.
Okayyy…. Before we indulge in dumping in both bottles of this stuff, bought at the cost of considerable annoyance with a trip to Home Depot, that emporium where we have vowed never to shop again, let’s just hang loose for awhile.
Dollars to donuts, that thing will be clear by this evening.
Our guy wants to drain & refill the thing, which will be a pricey experience at this time of year, when the City charges a premium for its water.
But I’m thinkin’….hmmm… Clogged pump, eh? What if the damn thing is clearing up because the pump is now operating optimally?
If it’s clear by tonight, this evening I’ll add one (1) bottle of liquid chlorine and then let the pump run overnight. If it’s still clear tomorrow morning? Well…then we’ll just wait and see what happens next.
Which is…sorta what we’re doing anyway.
The Cox tech showed up. What a charmer!
Mohamed. With a wonderful Arabic accent.
Well, Moslems tend not enjoy the company of dogs, so I figure I’d better pick up Ruby, whose mission in life is to love every human on the planet to death, lest she pounce him the instant he walks through the door…and LO! He announces that he loves dogs. He has a German shepherd. He thinks Ruby is the best thing this side of German shepherdom.
Amazing.
So he fixes the computer and reboots the modem and upgrades stuff, all the while chatting his charming young head off. Damn. Born 40 years too soon. Again.
So…can anybody think of some OTHER reason Cox needs to send a computer tech out here?
😀
Now to spend the rest of the afternoon working on all the stuff I’ve neglected, creativity-wise. The plan: get back up to date with the Ella story, sketch out the plot (which actually is already sketched out, roughly, so this will conveniently not entail much work), and set up another installment of Fire-Rider to go online next week.
So Stupendous Pool Dude’s plan to de-haze the pool seems to be working. His strategy entails pouring vast quantities of liquid chlorine into the drink, keeping the chlorine levels at “5” for a couple of days and holding the pH up, whilst running the pump through the main drain, which he believes will circulate more water faster than the usual set-up, wherein water is pulled through the skimmer.
