At the start of a week of chemical balancing of the pool water, we thought that all would be clear and blue by the weekend. How wrong we were. It might not have been as murky as at the beginning of the week, but the greenish hue stubbornly remained. It wasn’t entirely the fault of the guidance from the pool man and the chemicals we used. The weather had a lot to answer for. Between Monday and Friday, we had 5 inches of rain. And then on Saturday, it got really wet – a further 6 inches of torrential downpour. Eleven inches of rain falling in the week meant that there was an additional 11 inches of water in the pool, which had to disappear down the overflow pipe, carrying away nearly a quarter of the special chemical cleaners that had been added to the water. And, of course, any incentive to actually go swimming disappeared in the face of the combination of green water and rainy weather. At least all the landscaping that has been done did its job and controlled water from flowing into the pool or eroding the landscape.
And fate has turned against us, the weather has turned distinctly autumnal with dogwoods already showing signs of colour change. The sourwood trees (which are particularly noted for their bee-attracting properties due to their pale yellow pollen blossoms) are particularly bright red this year, overlaid with the last of the pale blossoms. So, it’s going to be cool swimming – but we will turn on the water heater to achieve at least one dip.
We were at a wine tasting dinner at the Corkscrew Cafe on Sunday, taking our friend Julie with us (her husband John was up North on business over the weekend). For a change (not) the wines were exclusively West Coast USA. Some pretty good (and some breathtakingly expensive for what they were). On Tuesday, we had a dinner invitation with new friends (met through the planning of the NOA charity Wine Tasting) and had a very interesting meal with them – Mike is an accomplished cook in the American style. As well as all this socialising, we needed to make progress on autumn planting, including visiting a soil regeneration project to collect worm castings – but that didn’t happen thanks to the weather conditions. Being retired is a full time occupation.