Our New House Honeymoon

We have been in our new house for four weeks now. We still love it. We still have to rub our eyes to believe we really live here. We are still in that “honeymoon” phase.

But I can feel the honeymoon starting to come to an end.

We have had a few experiences over the last four weeks. New home owner experiences.

We have had an overflowed toilet than ran down through the ducts into the basement downstairs. That was a mess, but we understand better now and are again quite content with the washroom.

We discovered and destroyed a hornet’s nest in a scrub bush in our back yard. It was right next to the girl’s clubhouse slide. It was huge and actually a masterpiece. The civilization that resided in this nest had been terrorizing the whole neighborhood and was as sophisticated as the Incas in their day.

We have a drain in our backyard – as do all other yards in our neighborhood – by city bylaw – that seems to be a nesting place for mosquitos. I have not figured out a remedy for this calamity yet, and would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

So after dark, I cannot sit in the back yard and listen to my Tiger ball games. And this is not an acceptable condition.

We also seem to experience a high rate of electrical power outages. And when the power goes down, the surge seems to spike more than I have known before. A set of three of these surges has blown out our LCD monitor, and caused the computer itself some questionable “issues”.

But then we had the pool mishap.

We have a 21 foot above ground pool. The back deck has several teirs and hangs over the pool like a dock on a lake. It’s quite nice.

The other night we were out cleaning up some yard mess; weeding, watering, and the like. In passing Darlene asked me to put the hose in the pool, “it looks a hair low” she said.

So I got the hose out, put the end in, and turned on the faucet. Then I went back about my business.

That was at 9:30 at night.

At about 11:30, it was raining heavy outside. And I could hear the heavy rain in our bedroom.

“Man, it’s pouring out there”, I said.
Darlene woke up from a deep sleep.

“Did you turn off the hose?”

“Oh crap!” I said. Okay, I did not exactly say "crap". But now I knew why it sounded like it was pouring rain outside.

Oh crap.

Out the back I ran. It was lightly sprinkling. But the backside of the skimmer was pouring out water like Niagara Falls.

Thunder boomed in the distance and heat lighting was going off like bulbs at a paparazzi festival.
And the hose was still running.

I ran over to the faucet and turned it off.

Then Darlene came out.

“Back-wash! Back-Wash! Back-wash!” she was yelling.

I unraveleled the flimsy blue back-wash hose and ran it into the drain in our yard. I fished it down far enough to be under the water level. Meanwhile Darlene was flipping the filter lever around to the back-wash setting. She flipped the motor on.

“Gerbeda-flubeda-thppppp”, said the hose as the air bed out of the hose and through the drain water.

"Blubeda-blubeda-blubeda…” said the hose as the backwash started its steady flow.

Luckily the hose was loud enough to mask our explatives as we scrambled in the now pouring rain, in the dark, stepping on rocks and pricker weeds.

"Blubeda-blubeda-blubeda…..”

About 15 minutes later, the pressure in the flimsy blue hose proved too much, and the hose gave way with a pop like a balloon. It burst about halfway to the drain. The yard started to flood.

We turned off the motor. We looked over our mess. We were soaked. We were unhappy. And we were certain we had destroyed our wonderful pool.

“It only took us three weeks to wreck it”, said Darlene - almost sobbing.

We stood in the pouring rain, and had a smoke.

And then we went back to bed.

The next morning we examined the damage. It was still raining. But the water in the pool was very cloudy. The good news is that the pool, the motor, the yard – all seemed to have survived our forgetfulness. There was no damage.

All was fine.

All but the flimsy blue back-wash hose.