Getting Contributions

My 10-year-old son, Little, really likes my idea to create Ankletown Station and populate it with all sorts of crazy, fun 3.75 inch figures. He told me that each day when he sees the new stuff that I've added to the cast of characters, he gets more excited.

He wants to be a part of it, so he started making his own contributions. I came home from work a few days ago, and found these two spaceship pilots on my desk with a note saying I could add them to the town.

That's Poe Dameron in his pilot jumpsuit and the other one is a rando A-Wing pilot. I don't know what her name is. She has one, because all Star Wars figures do these days, no matter how nameless they were in the movie (no more Hammerheads and Walrus Men, now it's Momaw Nadon and Ponda Baba), but I don't know what this figure's name is. She is Resistance A-Wing Pilot.

I got Little the X-Wing for Christmas one year in an attempt to convince him that Star Wars was as cool as Harry Potter or Pokemon. He liked it just fine, but I don't know that he agreed with me, at least back then. The sequel trilogy didn't appeal to him. He did eventually become a fan when the Mandelorian came out though. So, Huzzah!

The X-Wing was what came with Poe Dameron. He's been sitting in its cockpit on a shelf in my son's room for years, and Little decided it didn't make any difference if he was in there or not, so he brought it down for me to add to my group of spaceport denizens.

The deal was the same with Resistance A-Wing Pilot. I found the A-Wing ships on for $5 at Five Below a few years ago, back when the bottom was dropping out for those toys that nobody wanted from Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and The Last Jedi. I didn't really have a spot for an A-Wing on my own shelf, but I couldn't turn down the deal. This was an originally trilogy spaceship, and it was selling for $5!!!

So, I got it for Little, he put it on his shelves, but just this week realized that the figure in there doing nothing could be better put to use in Ankletown Station.

So, the cast grew by a few.

The next day, Little gave me another one that he found in his room.

I gave Little this Luke Skywalker back when I found the Luke and Wampa two pack at Ross, and bought it so I could add to my family of Wampas in my Christmas Display.

I had two wampas, but I also had two Lukes. I only needed the one that I had hanging from the ceiling like a Christmas decoration, so I gave the second one to Little. Well, now he's decided to give it back. So, I have a Hoth Luke on Ankletown Station too.

Lastly, Little found this one in his toy box and brought it to me.

That's the Darth Vader that came in a two-pack with the Imperial Probe Droid. Oh, now that I think about it, that droid will probably be coming my way when it gets located too. I guess I'll do an update post when that happens. 

I found the Darth Vader two-pack at Ross, and got it for Little because I wanted him to have a Darth Vader. Now I guess he wants me to have a Darth Vader, because he's given it back.

He's a sweet kid, and I'm pretty happy to see him excited about doing it with me. I'll have to involve him in the process of making it as much as I possibly can. You gotta take advantage of it when kids want to do something with you, because it only lasts so long, and Little is my last one, so it's my last chance to do it right.

Mud Bugs

Here in Houston, there's a custom of eating crawfish in the springtime. People get together and make a big party of it all the time. They'll boil up huge masses of crawfish and eat them in their backyard with friends, or at a restaurant, or with their church group, and so on.

I've wanted very much to participate in this tradition, but I've feared that I might be allergic to crawfish. I know for a fact that I'm allergic to shrimp, and crawfish are pretty similar creatures.

It's hard to know for sure though. I could go get an test at a doctor's office, but that would cost a decent amount of money. I could just buy some crawfish from the grocery store when they advertise them, but they sell them in large quantities. It wouldn't be good to buy a huge number of crawfish only to find that I couldn't get past the first one.

A little while ago, my daughter went with a friend to a seafood restaurant and got a bunch of crawfish, but I couldn't try those either, because they cook all their seafood in the same place, so it could be tainted with shrimp. It's not a legitimate test, therefore.

At last, my chance to determine the state of my allergies arrived. My wife's church had an activity planned. We were having a crawfish boil, and everyone was invited. That meant, I could try some crawfish, see if they triggered my allergy, and stop eating if they did or keep eating if they didn't without wasting a lot of money on the attempt.

Just in case, I brought my wife's bottle of allergy pills. It's supposed to help mitigate an allergic reaction if you take a Benadryl while it's going on. We had the off-brand generic version, but it works just as well.

It was a really great environment at the church for the crawfish boil. They set everything up on the far edge of the parking lot, and the tall trees on the edge of the property were already providing shade to the whole area by the time the party started.

There was a band performing for us during the gathering as well. Some of the older folks complained that they were too loud, but I enjoyed them. They were playing all the music I loved from my high school and college days. Although, if they really wanted to make the atmosphere correct, they should have been playing zydeco.

Before they started serving the crawfish, they had a critter crawl.

There was a whole bucket of live crawfish that had yet to be put in the pot, and kids could choose one, put it in the center of the chalk circle they'd drawn on the pavement, and then whoever's racer left the circle first won.

The kids didn't really seem all that interested in the race, though. They just wanted to play with the mud bugs. They all wandered around the parking lot holding a crawfish in their hand, looking at them and waving them around.

I grabbed one myself, and got a picture with it.

The allergies don't cause me problems unless I put the stuff in my mouth, so I felt safe and secure holding one in my hand. My son, on the other hand, should have had more supervision. He came walking up to me and my wife with a crawfish in his hand. He was holding it right, by the back, safe and secure, but I think he must have been poking at it with his fingers from his other hand, because it had clamped down on the tip of his ring finger, and was not letting go.

He started to cry as he walked up, complaining that it hurt and he couldn't get it off. So, I helped him pry its claws open to free him. He had wanted to come over and have me take a picture of him with his little friend, but now the picture was kind of ruined, because he couldn't stop crying. It pinched him pretty good. It even drew blood from his poor fingertip.

I told him he could get his revenge by devouring loads of its compatriots, but that didn't interest him much. He doesn't like crawfish. He tried them when my daughter brought them home, but just barely. They reminded him too much of cockroaches to to put them in his mouth. I guess they earned the name of mud bugs as far as he was concerned.

After that drama was over, it was time to start eating. I wanted to make sure that I was safe, though. I saw some shrimp on the table. I wanted to be sure that there was no cross contamination, so I hunted down our chef to confirm. 

He was from Louisiana, and had been cooking crawfish like this for around thirty years. Someone later told me he was apparently famous for his blend of Cajun spices that he put on the crawfish. And no, the shrimp was not cooked together with the crawfish. It would be a legitimate test of my allergies.

Our Cajun chef brought out the crawfish and dumped them on a table covered with a plastic table cloth, and it was on.

We grabbed plates, and dished up. A lot of the folks there were old pros at this, but I'm a long way from that. I daintily grabbed two crawfish for my plate. I figured that if they were safe, I could get more afterward.

We sat down to eat, and I turned to the pros to educate me on just how I was supposed to eat these things. They explained to me how you grab the tail, and twist right at the base of it, then pull. It removes most of the meat from the body. Then you can pull the meat out of the tail, clean any impurities that may still be clinging to it, and then you're ready to eat.

I took a bite, chewed and swallowed. My allergies aren't immediate, it takes a while for them to appear, so I sat and waited. I ate a little bit more, and it seemed like I might be okay. I was struggling with the cleaning part. I couldn't find what I was supposed to remove. I also was having trouble yanking the meat from the tail. I tried my second crawfish.

At about this point, I started to notice a tingling in my throat...was that because of the Cajun spices on the crawfish or was it allergies starting to emerge? I swallowed a time or two, checking the feel of my throat. Was it allergies? Was I just inventing it with my mind psychosomatically? Did I fear the allergies, so my mind invented them?

Then the inside of my ears started to itch. No, that definitely wasn't the spices. It was official, I am allergic to crawfish the same way I am to shrimp. I was pretty bummed. What a shame it was to sit for the rest of the crawfish boil and just watch everyone else eat. It looked fun, and the meat had been pretty tasty...the little of it that I had eaten.

I took two Benadryls to make sure that the allergic reaction didn't get any worse, and had to satisfy myself with the fact that at least now I knew. I am allergic to shellfish. I never need to try lobster or anything else to find out if I can handle it. I just gotta skip it all. What a bummer.

Bib Fortuna

 I was excited to find this guy again.

I saw him on the shelves a few months ago, before I had decided to try to make my own Rotgut Station-type diorama, and I didn't buy him. I wasn't amassing a collection of 3.75 inch at the time. The next time I went, he was gone, and I never saw him return again. The only option for 3.75 inch Star Wars was Lando Calrissian.

Today, I found him at a Walmart...a different Walmart than the other, so he still hasn't really returned or anything. I just found him elsewhere. I'm pretty much determined not to pass on any Star Wars aliens these days, so Bib Fortuna was someone I couldn't turn down.

So here he is on my shelf, waiting for me to get his city built so that he can inhabit it.

Walker-Bot

 I was looking at Walmart the other day, and they had this Darth Maul Mission Fleet thing:

I don't want the figure, it's just one of those tiny Galactic Heroes-type figures that's only about 2 inches tall. I have nothing that I could do with it. However, I was looking at that spider/crab machine thing that he is supposed to ride on, and I thought, "that could be a really cool droid." But I couldn't see the back of it to know what it looks like.

So, I had to come home and look up a video where you could see the back of it. Sadly, it's totally empty on the back. It looks like this:

So, I don't know. Maybe I could trash bash the back to close it up and make it a proper droid, but I don't really trust my skills with that, so I probably wont.

I wonder how the scale would transfer over to 3.75. This thing could be like a droid taxi that gives people rides around town...if it fits a 3.75 figure. Otherwise, it's kind of useless. So, I don't know if I'll get it. I probably won't, but we'll see. Maybe if I see it really cheap, I'll give it a shot.

Starting My Own 30-Day Challenge. It's Fresh Meat May/June, And I'm Hoping To Make Some Progress

I'm finally all caught up. From here on out, the videos will come out as the week that they are talking    about ends.

Here it is, the first week of Fresh Meat May/June. I think it's going well, but sometimes it's hard to tell. I got some weird readings on my scale and with my blood sugar right at the last minute which kind of shook my confidence a little. I will continue on, however, and we'll see how the rest of the month goes.

Murals

Since my daughter is an artist, I got the idea that taking her senior portraits in front of a bunch of murals would be a good background. So, last weekend, we went out and took shots at a bunch of different murals in the Houston area.

There's a lot of really good murals around the city.

Many of them have astronauts in them, since it's something that Houston is known for, and as a sci-fi fan, those ones always speak to me.

Murals are so popular that they even have a website completely dedicated to knowing where to look for them.

Are murals a big thing in your town? Or is it something else? What do you love about your city?

Getting The Band Back Together

One of the things I like most from Rotgut Station is the pictures he has at the club when a band is playing. They're always a little goofy, like his custom Daft Punk figures playing with robot accompaniment:

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Or, the full on alien band, including Max Rebo, Droopy McCool, and Sy Snootles; a member of the Modal Nodes; and...others.

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It's something that I definitely want to include in my own diorama, so when I saw a figure that could be a part of that the other day...

Well, I actually passed on it. I've never bought a Roblox figure before, and I have even less idea what that game is about than I do with Fortnite. I passed on it, but of course I remembered where it was that I saw it, and every now and then, I considered buying it when I went to the Walmart again.

Well, in a moment of weakness the other day, I finally gave in and picked it up. It's not a bad figure.

Although it is a little cartoony.

I love the instruments, though. The Keytar and the Guitar are great...although the guitar is a weird shape that makes it look more like a lute or something.

I don't know what the heck this character is supposed to be. I think he might be a mummy or something. He has pale skin like an undead character, and his arms are wrapped in bandages. He could just be a goth, though. He also has purple hair, so there's that.

There is another Roblox character that is supposedly a companion to this one. It's called Luna Galactic Popstar.

She comes with a mic, a mic stand, and a guitar...and I'm tempted to get her, but her eyes seem so big that she's even more cartoony than this one I just got.

If I had any skill, I might consider repainting them, but I most certainly do not have skill at that. She kind of makes me think of Rainbow Brite or Jem and the Holograms, though. I don't know. I'll have to think about this one. I'll probably skip it, but I'll be watching for when the Hasbro Vintage Collection comes out with Figrin D'an.

I want to get the entire band when that becomes possible. They're doing the whole band in the six inch scale guys, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time before they do the rest of them in 3.75 inch. Notice that he comes with three instruments, so you can get three of the same figure, but have them all playing different instruments, therefore they are three different members of the band.

Wade the Spiritual Rocker is like that too. I like is that he came with two instruments. I could put any old character next to him holding the other one, and the band is already on its way.

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there is a line of figures called Reaction Figures, where they make figures that look like what would have been made for a property back in the '80s. Basically, they're supposed to be like the old Star Wars figures. Except they make them for everything. Every property from Back To The Future to The Golden Girls.

They're doing a bunch of different music related figures recently, and I have to admit that I am sorely tempted to get the Run DMC figures they made.

They cost twice as much as other figures that I buy, and have so little in the way of articulation that you can't pose them in any way, so I probably won't get them. But I really am tempted. Imagine how cool the club in Ankletown would be with Run DMC taking the stage every night.

Who's house? Run's house!

Demo Day

We ripped out some of our kitchen cupboards this past weekend.

Some of them I broke to pieces with a sledgehammer, but others my wife wanted to save to use for storage in the garage.

We no longer have an oven that we can use. It's in the garage waiting to be reinstalled in the new cupboards when they are built. Also, I'm afraid it may never work again. My wife cut some wires that probably shouldn't have been cut. We may be buying a new oven when this is done.

And here I am starting up a month of eating only fresh meat. Am I going to be able to achieve that when we have no kitchen?

The Finale Post-Mortem Debrief Report Of The Second 30-Day Carnivore Challenge With Marshal Latham

We've finished again. We've made it through two 30-Day Carnivore Challenges, and we're here to tell you what happened, how it went, what we learned, and where we will go from here.

Cat's In The Cradle

 The other day, Empire Toy Works posted this picture on his Instagram channel.

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 Before seeing that post, I would never have considered using a Transformers Ravage as a cat robot with my other figures. For that matter, I hadn't even noticed that the toy was on the pegs right now at the Walmart that I constantly went to looking for more bullshit to buy.

But, the next time I went looking for bullshit to buy at Walmart, I saw that Ravage, and realized that it was the one from the photo. It was a great size to be a 3.75 inch scale robot cat. So, as you might have guessed, I bought it.

I do really like it. One thing I want when I build Ankletown Station is for it to be teeming with droids, and particularly droids from all different toy lines, not just Star Wars (although I do want the majority to be Star Wars). Most Transformers won't fit in with Star Wars and GI Joe guys, but this one is perfect.

And it's totally different from the robots in any other line. So, that's my favorite part. Also, it could make the perfect pet for my other cat robots that I talked about in my previous post.

Don't they look great together. Can't you just imagine the scene as the cat robot comes home from a long day at work, opens her apartment door and is greeted by her loving robot cat that's been waiting for her...to feed it. So she opens up a can of nuts and bolts, pours it into a bowl, and the robot cat chomps them all up with a crunchity-crunch-crunch-crunch.

Although, more likely is that when the cat robot and the robot cat finish a days work, their owner switches them off, and puts them on the power charger, and stuffs them in the closet for the night. They are robots after all, why would they have an apartment?

Speaking of being stuffed in the closet, this Ravage is a Transformer, and he's not one of the Transformers R.E.D. line that do not transform. I obviously want it to be a robot cat and not a cassette tape, so I won't be transforming it very often. I did think it might be funny to have a little 3.75 inch figure holding a transformed ravage saying, "Hey, does anybody know who this gigantic cassette tape belongs to? Somebody left their gigantic cassette tape here. Have you seen an enormous boombox anywhere? Because whoever has an enormous boombox has probably misplaced their gigantic cassette tape."

Turns out that this Ravage doesn't turn into a cassette tape, however. I found a picture of its transformation on Amazon. This is what the robot cat is supposed to turn into:

Yeah, I have no idea what that is supposed to be. Maybe Ravage lives on Junkion with the other Junkions, and when he transforms into his disguise mode, he turns into a pile of garbage. That's really all I can see in that picture. Anyone else have any idea?

Art Fest

They had an art festival in my kids' school district recently, and of course my daughter had something up for competition in the show.

 It's a really fun picture, chock full of aliens, some of them from popular culture and others just things she hatched out of her own mind. Then she did the same thing with spaceships on the mat around the picture. Some of the ships were originals, others were the Millennium Falcon, the Enterprise, or the Rocinante.

As you can see, she got a ribbon on her picture. That rainbow colored ribbon meant that it got a judge's choice award. Normally at these things, we have no idea what the different colors of the ribbons signify, but they had this paper attached to one of the displays, so we could see what a rainbow ribbon meant.

The paper says that Judge's Choice ribbons were given to the work that the judge's thought was the best in the grade level, and though it didn't win best of show, it had been among the finalists for that award. Pretty cool for my daughter to do so well.

The 30-Day Carnivore Challenge Finale, Did We Make It? Or Did We Fail? The Amazing Conclusion!

We made it all the way to the last day of the second 30-Day Carnivore Challenge. Time ran out, but did we make it to the end? Or did we blow it? I'm betting that you know the answer, but you should watch the video and find out anyway.

Competition

Today, I went out for a quick toy hunting jaunt. Only had time to check one store, so I made sure to go to one that I knew had something I was willing to buy. They didn't have anything else that I wanted, so I only bought the one thing I came for in the first place, though I probably shouldn't have. This guy was full price, and Target prices are already a little bit higher than Walmart.

I got the Emperor from Star Wars.

It's a pretty great figure, though I'm not sure I like the facial expression. He looks like he's always hitting someone with the force lightning, even when he isn't. That's kind of a shame. Nonetheless, I love me some Star Wars, and I love me the Emperor. I already had the figure in six inch scale, along with a couple of royal guards and a throne. Now I've got the short version.

He'll be great on Ankletown Station. I guess maybe he gives President Government some competition.

Disaster!

Remeber a few weeks ago when I showed off the pictures of our wisteria vines that are twined around the hammock stand we built in our backyard? If not, you can click this link and see the post. We've been bringing those vines along to make our hammock stand look awesome for years...you can click this link to see my post from a year ago touting its progress.

Well, the flowers faded away, and it was just a leafy vine for a few weeks, but just today, the flowers returned.

That's nice and all, and normally I'd be excited to see them, but just a few days ago, this happened:

Aaagh! Out of the blue, the vine we've been carefully cultivating for several years just up and dried out and died!

This was it at the end of April:

And this is what it looks like today?

Two weeks, and it's a total goner? This sucks. It was years before it got to this level.

My wife thinks the guys who resurfaced our pool may have dumped something out there or spilled something there and it killed the tree off. I don't know. 

They say we're having a bit of a drought here in Houston, but that's only if you've never lived in the western United States and you don't know what a real drought is. We still get rain, and I can't imagine the plant was so brittle that it was about to keel over dead if it wasn't receiving rain on a weekly basis, so I think my wife is probably right.

So, the pool looks better, but now the hammock stand looks worse as a result.

It's not 100% dead, there's these shoots from the base of it that survived, but those are a long way from climbing up the post and draping down from above replete with flowers.

I'm really bummed about this. The backyard was really coming together. Starting to look nice in all the areas after all the work we've done on it. Then, BAM! Right in the middle of that, something that can't just be quickly replaced happens, and it'll be years before it's complete again.

Mint-In-Box 2

I went to Ross today to see what they had. Well, they had nothing, but I did see this sign up in their toy section.

I know there's a big divide in the toy collecting community between Mint-In-Box collectors and Openers. I never expected Ross to come out and declare themselves for one side or the other, but there you go. I guess they're all for the Mint-In-Box.

Re-Pooling

My wife insisted we get a house with a pool when we moved to Houston. She said there was no way she was going to live in a place this hot and humid without a refuge to flee to.

It's been nice to have the pool, but I've found that we don't use it enough to justify its cost. Turns out my wife doesn't even really like to swim. Getting in the pool to her means getting into one of those blow-up floaty chairs, and floating on top of the water while reading a book. 

She told me that she doesn't like to go under water or get water on her face and hair. Seems weird for someone who insisted that we needed a pool at our house. I guess you aren't allowed to float like that at the community pool, so...

Anyhow, it's time for us to bear the brunt of yet another cost of having a pool. Every so often, your pool needs to be resurfaced. Depending on what you use to surface it with, it can be as low as five years or as many as fifteen years. I don't know how long it was before we moved into our house since the previous owners resurfaced it, but I'd guess it's been a really long time.

For once, my wife didn't want to do this ourselves. We contracted a company to come in and take care of it for us. It was a strange process, though. I mean, not really, but it felt strange to me. It was weird to see our pool in the state it was in for a few days.

The first day, they showed up and started draining the pool. I guess that can be a dicey thing. If you don't do it right, the water in the soil can cause the pool to pop out of the ground, completely ruining it. I guess the way they avoid that is by drilling two holes in the bottom of the pool for any ground water to rise up through.

They didn't even come first thing in the morning, but by noon, as I left for work, the whole thing was basically empty.

They put a pump down in there that must have some serious horsepower or something. We've drained some of the water from our pool and replaced it with fresh water to improve the chemical balance in the water a couple of times, and it took hours and hours to drain six inches off the top. These guys had the pool empty by lunch. 

And without the water in it, you can see just how much the surface needed to be replaced.

The next morning, the pool looked completely different.

This wasn't the new surface yet, though. This was just the prep layer. They tore off our old plaster and put this gray stuff over it to get it ready for the actual coating they were going to give it.

You can see in the next picture those two holes that are preventing the pool from popping out of the ground. The middle things are the pool drains, but the two on the outside were added by the workers.

The little guy just couldn't resist getting into the pool and playing around in it. We had a hard time keeping him out of there. He wanted to get in and run around every chance he could get, but we didn't know whether we were supposed to stay off or not.

The next day, they were in there putting on the real stuff.

This time they did start early. At the absolute crack of dawn, my wife and I had to move all the cars out of the driveway so they could get access to the backyard. But by 11:00 AM they were all done.

I was a little worried that they had forgotten to put the little sparkly bits into the mix. My wife had specifically requested them, little chunks of what looked like abalone shell mixed into the pebbly look of the finish. I texted the pool guy, and he assured me they were there. It didn't look like it yet because the finish hadn't been washed or polished yet. They were letting it cure right now, and once they started filling it with water, we'd really start to see it.

They left it for two days before coming in to finish it off. It was really hard to keep Little out of that thing during that time. He was thinking he had his own personal skate park in his backyard. He doesn't even skate, but he wanted to get in and run around as if he were riding a skateboard.

Eventually, they came in and started filling the pool.

This time, it wasn't fast. They didn't have a fire hose or anything to fill the pool with water as fast as they took it out. Instead, they hooked some thing onto he end of our garden hose, and turned it on.

We were warned not to turn it off at all. If they water didn't keep rising, it would leave marks on the side at whatever level it stopped at. So we made sure not to touch it.

My wife couldn't stop going on about how much she loved the new, darker blue color of the water.

She would frequently go to the back window, look out and gush about how beautiful the color of the water was.

I think it took more than 24 hours, but the pool finally reached the level it was supposed to be at, and we could turn off the hose.

Then the pool guy started treating the water. I guess that thing they put on the garden hose had some preliminary chemicals to get the water going in the direction it needed to go to one day be suitable swimming pool water, but he dumped several more bottles of chemicals into the water to optimize it.

My wife freaked out and called me at work when she came home one night and the beautiful blue water had turned a sickly green.

"What did they do to my blue water?" she griped.

I had no answer for her. It had been that enchanting deep blue when I'd left for work. Something had happened in the interim. The pool guy later told me that the color had gone green after he'd dumped a bottle of acid into the water. I don't know which acid he dumped in, there's several that you use in balancing pool water.

Luckily it didn't last long. By the next day the water was already getting better, and the pool guy kept coming back and adjusting things again and again over the next week.

The last part of the pool refinish was the mastic. That's the seal that goes around the bricks. You can see how bad it was in the picture of the green water up above. Here, let me put in a close up of the spot I'm talking about.

See that line that is supposed to go between the patio and the bricks? See how most of it is all rotted away and missing? That's the last thing we needed fixed.

A guy came on Thursday as I was leaving for work, and cleaned that all up and replaced it for us. The pool guy texted me the pictures of the finished product.

It looked so much better now.

He also texted me a warning to stay off of it until it finished drying.

Oh no! Little had been desperate to get in the pool since they filled it back up, and the pool guy had told me that the water was finally properly balanced and was safe to get into. When I'd told Little that morning, he had sworn that he was going to get in the pool as soon as he got home from school, which was about exactly the time that I got that text.

I quickly texted my daughter.

She said she was still on the bus, not home yet, and that I'd better try calling him on the Alexa. I did, but calling an Alexa doesn't work well if the person you're trying to contact isn't in the room with the device. I called for Little, but he never responded. Eventually, I got another text from my daughter.

I furiously typed a message to her, insisting that she get him out and make sure he didn't step on the bricks on the way out. I could only hope that he didn't get any of the stuff on him and track it all over the place. I could imagine it being all over the patio, or worse, stuck to the side of our brand new pool surface, making it look bad instead of so beautiful that my wife would swoon over it.

Turns out, however, that we lucked out. Either it was already dry enough, or he never stepped on it, because there is no place anywhere that I can detect any smudges or messes at all.

So, now the pool is all finished, and we're ready for our first plunge.

And it couldn't have come at a better time. The weather had turned bitterly hot at the start of May. We were flirting with record temperatures every day. We all wanted a chance to swim in that pristine blue water, and now we finally could.