The yearly battle against algae continues after this.
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It’s the morning of day 4 in a nice long weekend. It’s been busy, shall we get started?
We started our weekend journey at the Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum. It’s floor after floor of fun activities for kids to play and learn. Turns out it’s fun for adults too.
When we arrived we were just about the only family there. Then we were told we should scoot out of the first floor because the first field trip was arriving. That place filled up quick.
The field trips were a bit crazy but that didn’t stop The Boy from having a good time. He checked out everything. Favorites included a real ambulance, a huge water table, an indoor apple orchard, and a roof full of percussion instruments.
Next up, oil changes. Both Jeepies were in need of some new lifeblood. I think this was my most efficient oil change with the least spills yet! Hopefully I can do car washes today if there’s time.
This is where things took a turn for the angry. I loaded the trailer up with all of the concrete I had recently broken up as well as a good pile of junk wood, some misc. trash, and a few gallons of waste oil. Off to the local rural county dump!
I pulled up thinking I was good to go this time. There are lots of rules at this dump, so I checked the website over and didn’t see anything that told me I would have a problem.
‘No concrete on the weekends’
Of course. I was told I would have to come back on a weekday to have it weighed and inspected.
Inspected for what?
I reached out to my community group on Facebook to see if anybody would take my garbage. The best feedback I got was “You gotta sort that shit” and “Burn wood, ain’t you in the country?”
By the way this is the same county where this was posted.
So sort the shit I did.
All the wood is in the burn pile. Concrete is busted up, rebar and wire removed. Rebar is stacked for today’s project. Concrete is piled in the goat pen to make the next mountain. That was a pain, but I’m not wasting time on a work day morning to just get turned away again for some other nonsense reason.
And then there was the pool..
I stopped in to my local pool store for some advice, something I had not done in years past. I actually ended up going there 3 times this weekend, and I stopped in once at a different pool store. As it turns out, going to the pool store is just like going to the hardware store.
I walked away from the first trip with 10 pounds of alkalinity raiser. It raised the alkalinity, but not enough.
The second trip I picked up another 10 pounds of alkalinity raiser, 12 gallons of pool shock, a new skimmer basket, and a pressure gauge.
Based on the dead frog meter, I believe that the pool shock worked. I collected these poor fallen souls from the skimmer basket.
The pool turned from bright green to murky brown. Believe it or not that’s a good thing, the algae is dead.
Now we floc! The flocculant has been added and I’m waiting for it to do it’s magic. It will clump all the dead algae up so I can vacuum it out into the yard. This thing will be ready some day.
Oh yeah, trips 3 and 4.. My multi-valve wasn’t working right. I popped it open to find a nicely dry rotted gasket. Brought it up to first store who had ‘millions of gaskets in stock’. They informed me you can’t change out just the gasket and they did not stock the part. I went to pool store number two and they brought the part right out. I ended up getting an entirely new assembly handle and all. The new one works much better and doesn’t blow water out to waste when it’s in recirculate mode!
And finally, here’s a few pictures of the kids!
-Jed
RedShedJed 