Leslie’s, the pool company I love to hate and hate to love, annoyed me again yesterday afternoon with its ridiculous prices.
They propose to charge $75 to fix Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, whose wing sheared off when he hit the loose drain cover that the Leslie’s guy didn’t bolt on correctly. Given that I have exactly zero teaching income this summer and am in the process of cutting my monthly discretionary budget from $800 to $500 (or less, if I can manage it), seventy-five bucks was not about to flow from my wallet into Leslie’s coffers. Thanks, but I can vacuum the pool manually.
Problem is, though, thanks to Gov. Jan Brewer and the Band of Bigots at the legislature, all the Mexican palm tree trimmers are hiding out or deported. There are no gringo palm tree trimmers, to speak of: it’s a dangerous, dirty, hard job for which homeowners are accustomed to paying very little. Just now, for three blocks around my house only two yards have their trees trimmed—in the middle of June!
The palm trees are in full bloom, and they’re dropping billions of noxious little sharp-edged, pool-equipment-clogging blossoms and debris into the water. There are four Mexican palms out there. Gerardo the Lawn Dude is not answering the phone—he may be living in Mexico, too, these days. And I’m afraid to even ask the arborist how much he’d charge to climb up there and trim them. If he’d even do it (he probably would not), he’d no doubt charge seventy-five or a hundred dollars bucks apiece. Just now, I’m not willing to part with several hundred dollars of my emergency cushion. Not unless it’s for a real emergency. It doesn’t look like the palm trees are going to get cleaned up. Nor is Harvey going to get fixed anytime soon.
So, I had in mind to buy one of those in-line leaf canisters, figuring it wouldn’t cost much to plug the thing in to the vacuum hose, where it would run interference for the pump pot and spare some wear and tear on the pump itself while I’m manually vacuuming up the litter. It’ll mean I’ll have to vacuum the pool about every day this summer. But beggars can’t be choosers.
Leslie’s want’s $99 for one of these little guys. At $78, Amazon is underpricing Leslie’s. Not only that, but you can acquire a brand-new one here for the cost of refurbished at Amazon. Or so they say. So, I suppose I’m going to have to kill some time driving around the city searching for something like this. Tomorrow I’ll pass a Home Depot on the way home from campus, assuming I choose to drive the surface streets.
A much smaller one
{sigh} i can’t afford this…
If the feds don’t override Arizona’s draconian anti-Mexican law (and let’s be frank: it’s Mexicans we’re talking about…few illegal Canadians get picked up in Sheriff Joe’s dragnets), then I guess I’ll have to take the palm trees out. I hate to do that—they’re probably as old as the house, very tall and stately. And nothing else can go into the narrow strip of soil between the pool walls and the block fencing. But I sure can’t afford what white guys charge, nor do I care to deal with the class of men that I’ve run into in that category. The last time I hired gringos, they got into the garage and stole my tools.
Oh, no…wait! That was the pair before the clown who got mad when the German shepherd went after him because he was trying to break into the yard of the old house by jimmying the RV gate. Holy mackerel! I’d put that scumbag out of my mind. He came back after he knew I’d left and vandalized the trees in my backyard—one of the neighbors saw him re-entering the yard. Ripped about a third of the canopy down off the fig tree, and pulled a big limb off one of the ashes. The fig tree never recovered.
They’re just not guys you want to have around. If I can’t find Mexican workers, I’ll do the yard work myself and cut down everything I can’t take care of on my own. That’ll be quite a lot, because I’m too old to thrash around in 100-degree heat.
Guess I can shop around all I want…no matter what, I can’t afford to underwrite the consequences of the haters’ fear of immigrants.