Hello! First of all I hope everyone enjoyed Father’s Day weekend! We just hung out at home. My husband requested lasagna for dinner so I made this lasagna with a tofu ricotta and spinach filling:
Now that I’m doing all my running in the pool, it’s come to my attention that our pool area needs some serious attention. To start with, we never took down part of our baby gate (and my youngest is now twelve years old.)
This was out of sheer laziness. We didn’t want to deal with the palm trees dropping fronds into the pool, and convinced ourselves that it looked just fine like that. But running in little circles around and around the deep end of my pool, I’ve had a lot of time to think, and decided it was time to take care of it.
I spent two hours today working on those palm trees. Taking down the gate was the easy part. Then I collected, oh I don’t know… about 50,000 dead palm fronds that were stuck in all those trees? I pulled them all out, then had to carry armload after armload to the curb. I really called upon my experience with long runs for this project. It was long and tedious. And hot. I just kept telling myself to keep moving forward, and that little by little I would get there. And I did!
Unfortunately this is one of those projects where once you start, it becomes clear how much more there is to be done. I’ll post some “after” pictures after I do more cleaning and landscaping. But it was a great start.
And look at this pile of palm fronds I cleaned out…
Oh, what’s that orange cone, you ask? WELL!
Way back in September we had The Great Plumbing Tragedy of 2020, where our main line became completely blocked and raw sewage backed up into both our bathrooms. It was one of the worst days of that year, which is saying a lot.
Rapid Rooter came out and, for the small fee of $500, unclogged the line. Then they told us that our whole pipe had to be replaced, at the cost of $10,000. WHAT.
We ran this scenario past a plumber friend of ours and his advice was: Do nothing. The line was clear (for the time being) and he suggested that we wait and see what happens, and that maybe eventually we could just replace the part of the pipe that’s damaged instead of the whole thing.
Things went along fine until last week when we noticed part of our lawn was completely sodden, next to the sidewalk. We called the water company and they declared it an emergency- our pipe had burst and it’s dangerous to have raw sewage leaking out- and they sent someone from the city over to take a look.
The guy from the city came, looked at it, and told us that the damage was on our side, not theirs, so it was technically our responsibility. But since he was there anyway, he said, he would just go ahead and fix it. FOR FREE. “Do nothing” turned out to be a $10,000 piece of advice.
As my husband so eloquently put it, “Rapid Rooter can suck it.”
And one last thing…
Anyone else notice that the women sprinters in the Olympic trials all looked like supermodels??? It was bizarre! When they switched to the middle distances I was like “Oh, here’s all the normal-looking people.”
I hope everyone is having a great week!
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Ever had a plumbing disaster? – It’s not fun!!!
10 Responses
I know what you mean about cleaning. Once I start, I get obsessed. The same with trimming trees. All of a sudden everyone needs to be done.
What’s next?
Yup on the plumbing disasters – many showers, toilets leaking into our downstairs.
The best advice: Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff. It’s corny. But life is too short, Just do it.
And yes those sprinters look amazing.
Yes! That advice may sound corny but it’s so true- it really is all small stuff.
Oh wow, what a difference without the 50,000 dead palm fronds! I can imagine that it was very tedious indeed, but it was worth it!
And kudos on saving USD 10’000! Amazing that the city guy will fix it for free. So cool.
The best advice was very simple: track your expenses and improve your savings rate. What a difference that made!
Okay Catrina, I definitely needed to hear that advice! It’s an area where we still struggle.
the backyard maintenance is a never ending project over here as well! That and the organizing everything
We neglected the backyard for a little too long and it turned into a jungle. Arg!
Firstly, the work you did by the pool looks lovely!!! Well done. And secondly that $10,000 advice you got!!! Your plumber friend deserves a Bell’s!! We’ve had a leak for the past 6 months but fortunately it was on the water company’s side. But we basically spent 6 months waiting for them to attend to it. Very disappointing, given water is such a scarce resource in this country. But luckily they sorted it out last week. It took them less than 5 minutes!
Oh, that’s crazy that it took five minutes to fix a leak that had been there for six months! Sounds like a typical water company schedule. Glad it finally got done.
Now that’s a pile! I’d be the same way…once I start pulling random weeds or wayward grass, you might as well hold all my calls for a few hours. Nice that you didn’t have to drop $10,000!
Yes, yardwork is somehow addictive- once you start there’s so much to do and you don’t want to stop!