[Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]
4/22/23
Aloha Everyone!
This was a pretty quiet week here. Our yearly onslaught of Spring Break tourists is winding down, Merrie Monarch is over, and aside from a "cold" front that moved through the state early in the week bringing another .5" of rain, the weather has been uneventfully nice despite some afternoon and evening showers. Our pool hit 84d degrees, which is our age-adjusted sweet spot and so we managed to work out most days.
My main house projects have been to begin our month-before-the-trip preparations, and to repair our pool robot cleaner. The preparations are mostly outside trimming and spraying, timed now so I can do them again right before we leave. The pool cleaner repair is something I've done before when it suddenly seems to get lazy, because a leaf or other debris that gets hung up in the inner mechanism, a part wears out, or there is something lowering the suction pressure at the pump. I've become very good at taking this thing apart and replacing pieces that routinely wear out. I can find the parts online and they generally aren't very expensive. I replaced several things this week but that didn't completely solve the problem, so then I suspected there was something lowering the suction. This is the type of robot cleaner that works when the pool pump sucks water from the pool and filters and heats it before sending it back to the pool. The flowing water drives a little turbine inside the cleaner and that powers its movement. I did a quick search for "how-to" videos on pool equipment adjustments and I found one explaining how to adjust the vacuum. Closing and reopening the main valve seems to have improved things a lot. Perhaps something was partially clogging the valve and the sudden surge dislodged it. I'll keep you posted.
Karen and I played golf on Thursday at Makalei, along with her golfing buddy. It was a pretty good round
for me, much better than the previous outing. Even though my score wasn't much different, I felt like I was playing a lot better. I got a couple of bogies and even one birdie! The birdie was on a par 3 hole. My t-shot felt pretty good, but I lost track of the ball. However, we found it -- about 6 feet from the pin! And darn if I didn't make that putt! Another highlight was when one of Karen's fairway shots hit our friend's ball, bounced onto the green, and rolled up close to the hole! Billiards! A final example of why this was a fun round of golf was when I hit a beautiful chip shot that looked like it was going to land right near the hole -- but instead came down on the butt-end of a peacock who had suddenly decided to stroll across the green. He wasn't harmed, thankfully, but boy did he jump!
 |
| Don't Pop The Peacock! |
That's about it. Hope you're all enjoying Spring! Stay well, ignore the crazies.
3 comments:
You make it seem like retirement isn't half bad.
My academic career was very rewarding and satisfying. But retirement has offered a whole other set of opportunities and challenges. For instance, I'm amazed at the list of things I've learned and done since retiring, all the way from learning a bit of Hawaiian to traveling in Mongolia to how to fix a pool robot cleaner...
I was in a class recently on biology of reproduction and peacocks were an example of the balance between sexual selection and natural selection. Looks like you were almost an agent of natural selection!
Post a Comment