4 September 2020
Today has been a very busy day. I continue to wake around 2am and fail to fall back to sleep. I read a little and then turned out the light around 4:30am. I didn’t wake again until 8am. I saw a headline on the web suggesting a lot of the lack of sleep is due to pandemic anxiety. Maybe that’s my problem.
After getting up, making coffee, eating my shredded wheat with blueberries, I noticed two more palm fronds had fallen from the Bismarckia in the front yard. There are still around 5 more fronds that will fall, probably before next week is out. When I went to cut up the two fronds, it pretty much filled up the entire yard waste bin.
I raked leaves in the side yard. It’s amazing how much leaf drop there is from my neighbor’s mango. I’m not complaining. Although I didn’t get the benefit of mangoes this year, I probably will next year. The tree seems to be super productive every two years. Add that to the leaf drop of the star flower trees and the fire plant trees, there’s a lot to rake. It didn’t help that the yard waste bin had been too full the past pickup period to accept the rake up. That and I couldn’t get to some areas because of the old cabinets in the yard.
Speaking of cabinets…. My last conversation with the Baxter Restoration supervisor was that his construction guys would be out the first thing yesterday morning. They showed up at 5pm. They mostly did what they were supposed to do: (1) place pulls on the cabinets and drawers (2) change out the power cord for the dishwasher and (3) they helped me replace some overly large furniture slides on one piece of furniture with more appropriately sized slides. After they left around 6:30pm, I realized they failed to put one pull on the spice rack cabinet. I can live without that until they return on September 21. That’s when the new upper cabinets are to be shipped to my house.
Rather strangely, one of the first things the construction guy asked was where were my old cabinets. They have been sitting out in the rain and sun for the past two weeks. Initially, he had asked if he could have them for a friend and I said yes. They were supposed to haul them off.
Two weeks later and they were still there, getting soaked with frequent downpours and blistering sun. I called Baxter Restoration and asked if it was OK to put them out for bulk pickup and he agreed. If I asked someone for old cabinets, I don’t think I would wait 2 weeks to load them up. There were water stains all though the wood and they were beginning to warp.
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After raking and sawing palm fronds, I cleaned the pool filter, checked the chemicals, and washed down the patio. It’s getting to be the dry season here. Since Florida is a peninsula, our wet season is in the summer. The dry season is every season but summer. From May to August we get the majority of our 54 inches of rain per year. That means we get some tremendous downpours when it does decide to rain.
Anyway, as we are heading into the dry season (and peak hurricane season – September – I decided to check out the sprinkler system. I hadn’t used it since June. There’s always a few sprinkler heads that get blocked with disuse. Fortunately, there were only two that needed to be cleaned out. Once I clean them out, I always check by running the system through the three zones to make sure they all are working. When I went to check the system, no water came through any of the heads. The pump hummed and was working but no water. Somehow, while working on the system, the pump lost prime. It’s never done that before.
I had to take off the head of the system head and add water. One I put the head back on, it still didn’t work. Then I had the bright idea of opening up the hose into the bleed out with the pump on. It finally got primed. However, it’s still not working exactly correctly. That means I’ll probably simply operate it manually instead of using the automatic timer. Later, when everything calms down, I’ll probably call out a sprinkler service to figure out what the problem is.
As far as the pandemic is concerned, I continue to get mixed messages from data from the state. The official word is that the number of cases continues to drop yet they reported over 3,000 new cases today. Last week, there were only a little over 1,000. That doesn’t seem like a drop to me. I suppose the only real data points would be the number of hospitalizations with Covid and the number of ICU vacancies.
Of course, with all the outside work today, I probably put too much stress on the right arm. As I type this, I can feel tiny twinges in my biceps.
Stay tuned and stay safe!
