Tonight we experienced the worst thunderstorm that I have seen in years. Thunder boomed, lightening lit up the skies, the dogs [and cats] all ran for cover and the skies just opened up. Finally the dogs asked to go downstairs to the relative safety of their crates for the duration of the storm. I can’t say that I blame them. I was ready to run for cover too each time I saw the skies light up. We had some very close hits. The lights flickered on and off, we lost cable TV and it still is not back on by 10:00 p.m. We still have the air conditioning on tonight [though it hasn’t run in a while now] because it’s so humid and sticky outside. I guess I’ve forgotten what humidity can be like after being away for 30 some odd years. Tonight it’s not much fun. I know Rick posted to his site about having a “joyful” moment while I was gone last night. Hmm..maybe he was just joyful I wasn’t here? Because for sure, the dogs have been anything BUT good since I’ve been home. Maybe it’s the drop in barometric pressure that set them off; or maybe not. It always used to in Colorado. Or, maybe I should just leave again? Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day. I certainly hope so.

Hellooooooo! Anybody out there? Is anyone reading this drivel that I keep writing? Or should I be confining it to my own personal diary, on paper, tucked into my bedside drawer? If I don’t start getting some response from people out there in cyberland, that is exactly what I am going to do! I have not had any comments except for one early on [bless you, Margie!]. No one emails me [except my Mom-in-Law, thank you!] to let me know whether or not you are enjoying any of this or not. I mostly started this blog to keep in touch with everyone, but yet I hear NADA from 95% of you! Surely you can’t all be that busy that you can’t drop me a line? And, for anyone who is not family or friends, are you reading this? Please let me hear some kind of feedback. I know someone is visiting the site because the hits just keep going up! If you like it, please let me hear from you. Otherwise, I may just take all of it offline and keep it to myself!

It was another strange day today. To begin the day, the cable TV was still not up. So, Rick called and they admitted we must have a problem since everybody else seems to be fine. Okay, we’ll send someone out but it could be anywhere from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Great, thanks a lot. Just what I wanted to do while my Mom is here visiting, is spend the day waiting for them to come. We went to the grocery store early [and the wine store; I’m certain we’re going to need some kind of sustenance here]. Rick had to drive into New York City this morning for a meeting with a potential client and we knew he would be pretty late in getting home. The cable guy arrived around noon and said there was nothing he could do and that he needed the next level of technician to come out. He had seen another tech down our street working and asked him what he was there for. When they discovered they were there for the same reasons, they concluded the problem was widespread. 24+ hours later and still no TV.  I guess we should be thankful that we still have internet service and phone since it’s all through the same cable.

Not having TV is a bit like having a power outage. You KNOW you don’t have any power, yet you go over and flip on the light switch. Nothing happens. Same thing with TV. I don’t watch it much, but somehow when it’s not available you miss it all the more. You can’t watch the news. You don’t know the weather forecast. You can’t watch your favorite programs, and worst of all, your TIVO won’t record them! Hey, what’s up with that?  I must admit, if this kind of outage happens again we will go back to DIRECT TV. We brought our dish with us, so no real biggie there. It’s just more cost effective to have the digital cable, phone and internet all rolled into one.

Anyhoo, no TV. My Mom can’t watch her Soaps. We read. I knitted. We weeded the flower beds. We decided to watch a movie. Great. We decided to watch a DVD. I can’t find the remote for the TV in the kitchen area, which has a VCR and DVD bulit in. We put in the DVD, start watching the movie and all is good. The doorbell rings, the dogs go crazy and I need to put the DVD on hold. Only without the remote I have to use the few buttons on the TV; SKIP [reverse], PLAY, STOP, SKIP [forward].  I can’t pause it, I can only push STOP. Will it start back up in the same place?  You all know how frustrating DVDs can be. The door turns out to be the kid down the road asking for a school donation. Crap, all that commotion for that?? I say no to the donation and push the PLAY button. It works, but I decide to feed the dogs while we are at a stopping point. When we start it back up the darn DVD starts at the beginning instead of where we left off. Again, without the remote I can only use SKIP, which is not really fast-forwarding. Let’s just say things didn’t go smoothly and after much back-and-forthing [the end of the movie, the beginning again, etc] we finally get to the point where we left off. At this point it’s frustrating and my Mom, who doesn’t own a DVD player, doesn’t understand why I’m having so much trouble.

The movie was good [The Butcher’s Wife] and we are expecting Rick to call and say he’s back from his trip into the Big Apple and on his way home. The phone rings, it’s Rick. It’s about 5:15 and he’s still at the studio in NYC. Okay, dinner without him. On a Friday evening when it’s raining it’s going to take him forever to get out of there. We decide to watch another movie while dinner is in progress. All goes well until the DVD starts to stutter and the picture is breaking up into pixels for several frames. Then the picture freezes altogether. We wait and watch. Well, I say to Mom, I’ll try to do something. I push SKIP; nothing. I push PLAY and it goes back to the beginning of the movie. Mom and I just look at each other and start to laugh. We can’t help it, this is ridiculous. SKIP really does mean SKIP and we keep SKIPPING over the part we need to be watching. We laugh some more and pretty soon we can’t stop. I swear, I only had one glass of wine so far…well, maybe one and a half. My Mom has tears rolling down her face she’s laughing so hard. It may sound stupid to you. Maybe you had to be there.

Rick finally arrives home at 8:15. It’s raining. The TV is still not working and they are supposed to come tomorrow between 2:00 and 4:00. More waiting. My poor Mom. Let’s hope the rest of her visit goes more smoothly. Tomorrow we’re going to eat lunch out at the TEXAS WIENER place and see how that is. Then spaghetti and meatballs for dinner. And so, the end of another strange day.

Half of our TV channels are working but the quality is very poor. The channels missing are all the normal ones like ABC, CBS, NBC.  The cable people came out and stopped in the road [we would never had known they even came except I went out to feed the birds] but they didn’t call until 6:00 this evening to ask if our service had been restored. I said no; she said okay I have a Thursday or Friday open. I said WHAT?????? That would make it a week without real service. NOT acceptable. She said okay, I have Monday but it’s an “open” appointment, meaning they could come anytime. She said our neighbors are reporting service restored. Well goody goody for them! I threatened Direct TV again, but I’m sure she didn’t care one whit. This is getting really ridiculous. If I miss the finale of Apprentice, I will seriously have to think about kicking some butt.

We had pouring rain most of the day. I think it stopped around 2:00 p.m. We’ve gotten more rain in the past few days than I think Colorado has gotten all year to date. I love it, yet it’s almost alien to me to see it literally pouring!

Our Texas Wiener lunch was pretty disappointing. The chili sauce was kind of strange with a weird spice in there. We couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Curry? Cinnamon something? Well, whatever it was, none of us liked it. Our spaghetti and meatballs, however, was a very good meal. We watched a TIVO’d movie out of desperation [Curse of King Tut’s Tomb] and it put my Mom to sleep. Right now it’s on PAUSE with an hour to go and Rick and I are headed off to bed ourselves.

Tomorrow it’s off to the market in Warwick again, this time with Mom. We hope to buy a rabbit to grill. Yummy!

Geez, it sounds like it’s raining again? Yes, it is, just ever so softly and gently. Perfect for sleeping! G,night!

Wait, wait! Just another note. THANK YOU to those few of you that responded to my message regarding who is actually reading this blog. For those loyal members of my blog [be they few] I will keep posting. Thanks for your support.

On Saturday the pool place called to verify that we had an appointment for “an opening” scheduled for Monday. She also made a point to tell us that if we had any excess water on top of our cover that we needed to make sure to have it pumped off before they guys arrived. HA HA. Excess water, right. We’ve only had about 2 inches of rain this week, so yes, of course we had A LOT of water on the top of the cover. What fun. The little bitty pool cover pump that we unearthed in the basement doesn’t work all that great. It takes forever to pump the water off and half the time it gets clogged up with leaves and debris. In short, it’s a real pain in the you-know-where!

So, on Sunday we did our best to get the water off. Rick kept fiddling with it but half the time it wasn’t working. He got out a bigger pump that we had in Colorado for cleaning out the water in our fountain. It didn’t work either. We managed to get the little pump working for awhile but it wasn’t getting the job done. We ended up with a “bucket brigade” where I scooped the water off with a bucket while kneeling down, then stood up and passed the bucket over the chain link fence to either my Mom or Rick, then they took the bucket and dumped it over the wooden fence that surronds the pool deck area into the flower beds. GAWD, I hope the plant survive that green, brackish water! Yucko. Anyway, we were pretty pleased with the amount of water we had removed. Until that night when it rained some more and filled it right back up again! We decided to leave it for the pool guys to take care of.

Well, yesterday was the day of the POOL. RIck worked from home in order to be here when the pool was opened for the first time. For those of you that have seen photos of the pool and the ugly white chain link fence that was around it, be prepared to be absolutely amazed at the transformation! We were told that the original owners had small toddlers, hence the overkill. What we could never understand was why the previous owners never took it down. It would have been hard to enjoy the pool, and surely any poolside activites would be pretty boring [read: no spontaneous throwing of bodies into the pool, etc]. All you could do was go through the gate and right into the pool. You couldn’t even sit on the edge of the pool very easily. Even when we met the neighbors last week, one of the first questions they asked when they found out we had bought the “house with the pool” was, hey, what’s up with that fence? So, we knew one of the first things we were going to do was take it down.

So, yesterday, down it came. Rick started by taking down the chain link first of all. A tedious job at best since all the little connecting wires had to be taken off first of all, and most of those with a pair of wire cutters. Mom and I helped by picking up all the little cut pieces of wire and connectors. Next came the top poles and gates. All that’s left now is the upright poles, and since those are bolted into the concrete, they will take a bit more effort to get rid of. The bolts are all rusted, so will have to be cut off. Still, it made a huge difference. Here is the work in process. Note the ugly winter pool cover!

Hey, we’re starting to feel like we’re on HGTV or something on the “Makeover My Pool” segment. Now all that was left was to wait for the pool guys to come. We were really looking forward to the great unveiling since we had no idea what the pool looked like under that awful cover. They arrived pretty much on time, and it was obvious the one guy, Mike, knew our pool because the first thing to come out of his mouth was “Hey, what happened to the fence?” He said he’d been telling the other guy about it on the way over here. Yeah, and I can just imagine what he was telling him. He did tell us that having the fence so closely around the pool made it very hard to take the pool cover off and put it back on. Uh, yeah, that is kind of an understatement. He didn’t say, but I’m pretty sure he was very grateful he didn’t have to work around it again! They started by letting the water out of all the ugly blue weights that were keeping the cover in place. I asked him if there was another way to do this and he told us about safety covers. They fit so tightly over the pool that all those weights were not necessary and best of all, you’re gonna love this one, NO MORE PUMPING THE WATER OFF! SOLD!! Sign us up for one of those! So, when the pool gets “closed” in the fall we are installing one. They brought a big pump with them and were able to get the water off the cover in a lot less time than it would have taken us. Now we were ready for the big unveiling. What does the pool really look like? Are you ready? Do you have your swim suit on? Okay, here it goes:
TA DA!!!!!!!!!!

Isn’t it gorgeous? Don’t ya just love it? We can’t wait to go for a swim, but first we need to put its solar blanket on and get the water temp up a bit. Right now it’s hovering around 60 degrees. BRRRR!!! I know the poles sticking up are pretty ugly right now, but hey, it’s a big improvement, don’t you think? Maybe we can stick Tiki torches in the tops of the poles?

The dogs don’t know what to think. We let them out and they cautiously sniffed it while walking the entire way around it. I splashed some water up on Sailor and he didn’t want any part of it! Some Sailor he’d make! Well, Mr. Pretty Paws doesn’t like to get his feet wet anyway. Talk about a mis-named dog, LOL!  They were really funny. Daisy was brave and stuck her feet in at the stairs. We let eBay [the kitty] out and she was pretty funny too. Here are some of their reactions.

We actually don’t have the pump running just yet as we needed to add about 4 inches to the water level. We’re doing that over 2 days so we don’t put any pressure on our well. They needed to do a small repair to the pump hoses due to dry rot, but tonight we should be ready to roll! I ordered 3 new swimsuits from L. L. Bean which haven’t arrived yet. Guess I’ll just have to go skinny-dipping if they don’t come soon. We have no idea what the dogs are going to think when we go in the pool. I expect some pretty funny reactions and maybe a few dogs in the pool as well. I wouldn’t put it past Bart, the water dog, to jump right in with us. Right now they pretty much ignore it. More to come, I’m sure!