fairy dust was falling!

F A I R Y D U S T W A S F A L L I N G !

Tiny, lite cellophane-like flakes twinkling in the sunshine were floating down onto us as we walked to the car with our groceries, through the parking lot at Payless on the West side of town today, at around 3P.M. Yes! I thought so, too. snowing in the sunlight? How fascinating! There was only a thin cloud layer and the sun shown so brightly behind it, that it lit up the little thin pieces of ice, so that they sparkled as it floated down, and even as it covered the crust over yesterday's frozen snow-covered ground. I shouted to the other people in the lot putting their groceries in their cars: "Look! its fairy dust!" and I was smiling and laughing, and so were they! I've never seen anything like it before! How totally incredible! 68, and winter has not ceased to surprise me. When I went out on the deck this morning to fill my dog's heated water dish, the snow crunched under my feet, but it was covered all over with this twinkling stuff. I could only wonder why. Now I know...it must have happened last night too! The Eskimos have so many words for snow, each named for the different types that fall. It s like LOVE, so many kinds, but we only have one word for it. Why is that ? I wonder.

We had a short, relatively warmer spell, briefly up in he 30's a few weeks ago, when I was planning to use my jacuzzi which is out on the back deck. If you remember, I got all poetic about it. When I went out that morning, the water in it was ICE cold! The breaker had been tripped during a snow storm just a few days before. The sky had been lighting up with " heat" lightening, while it was snowing, but I never thought to check to see if the tub was still working. During the intervening time, while the heater wasn't working, it got cold, and was about to form ice in the sub zero cold. I had to work fast and bail out about two bathtubs of water and haul hot water from the sink, 2 1/2 gallon buckets at a time, until I'd gotten about 4 bathtubs of water into it, so the pump would circulate without shutting off the motor within a few seconds after I'd reset it. I was afraid it was going to freeze over totally and ruin the heater and motor and possibly crack the tub shell, if I didn't hurry. I made the mistake of trying the jets while the water was below the pump intake, however. It warmed up to over 40 degrees so that I felt all right about leaving it and going to bed that night. But I woke up at 3 AM, feeling something was wrong. I checked and the pump had stopped and the jets were surging and the tub had lost all of the water that I put in it! I had to carry buckets of hot water to it again and pour it right into the filter intake, then clean the filter. The water was finally high enough and warm enough, that I could be fairly confident that a sudden temperature dip through the rest of the night wouldn't damage it. When I got up the next morning the temp was up to 52 degrees, but about another tub of water had disappeared and the jets were surging again, because it was below the pump intake again. Well, the weather was getting colder and colder. I had my son-in-law come over to help me with the water hauling, because by then I was too exhausted to keep doing it myself. I didn't know yet, That I could get an adapter to run the water from the kitchen sink directly by garden hose, to the jacuzzi. I had just gotten a new hose this past fall and hadn't used it, so it was clean, and we tried to run water directly from the water heater to the jacuzzi. Well, my son-in-law had to release the pressure on the overflow valve to get the water to flow out of the tank through the hose to the jacuzzi. We emptied the dirt out of the bottom of the water heater first, but the overflow pipe started leaking onto the utility room floor, which has no drain. My other son-in-law was consulted, and he told us how to get the leak stopped, and we had to stop filling the jacuzzi from the water heater directly, to get it to stop flooding the utility room floor, because the pipe ends so close to the floor that there is no space to put a pan or bucket under it. We had to fill it by hand again in 5 gallon buckets. I was so tired, I could only fill the buckets for him. Well, son-in-law 2 also told me I could get an adapter so I could connect a hose to the kitchen faucet, but it was Sunday evening by the time son-in-law 1 had gotten here and the hardware stores were already closed!

Monday morning I called Blue Diamond Spa, where I had bought my jacuzzi, but they said they couldn't get there until Wednesday! Then, when the spa company called back later Monday to tell me, that for and extra $150.00, they could consider it an emergency and change their appointments around and be there the same day, I had already gone to Ace Hardware and gotten the faucet attachment, and filled the jacuzzi back up with hot water, and this time it wasn't surging anymore, and I had been able to turn on the jets, which were finally just working fine, it wasn't emptying itself anymore and the temp was up to 90 degrees. I told them that they had lost an opportunity to make some money, because I'd been able to fix it myself, Ha! It was a very humbling experience, however. I'd been so smug, thinking that I was going to thumb my nose at 'ol man winter, while soaking my bod in my hot tub on the deck! by the time it had heated up to 104 degrees, it had gotten a whole lot colder outside, and I was afraid my feet would stick to the snow around the tub if I tried to get into it. And I still needed to correct the chemicals and vacuum out the dissolved particles but didn't have what I needed. Since then I got a new filter, a hot tub hand vacuum, got the water tested and bought test strips. I could get in, but it was so cold by then, I thought I'd just wait a few. I finally figured out that I can put down newspapers on the cold snow around the tub when I am ready to get in, but now I've decided to recondition the water and vacuum out the iron and calcium particles that precipitated out of the hard water that I put back into the tub, first. I don't know how soon I'll get to use it.

Since the great jacuzzi debacle, when the weather got really brutal out there. We went out to eat at TGIF, ( my daughter's my niece and me), and I was going to swim and soak in the jacuzzi at my gym, before meeting them. It was so cold, that they had left the cover on THEIR pool and jacuzzi and wasn't letting anyone into the spa to use it. by 6:30PM, it was already minus 6 degrees, that day. Last week temperatures were getting as low as minus 16 degrees at night and were we having minus 0 days. Wellll, I just decided to walk in the mall for exercise at that point, LOL. I'm not really the Polar Bear Club type, LOL. Its now back up in the teens and twenties, so..... maybe I'll soak after tomorrow, if it doesn't get into the minus zero's again.... At least we had a few rays of natural sunshine coming into he sunroom windows and I could sunbathe on my lounge chair, surrounded by my tropical plants. See the scan ----->

Post Script: Hey! the weather has warmed up o the balmy 30's from that low of minus 16, one night. Some of the snow actually melted today and there was lots of sunshine. Soon I will venture back out to soak in my jacuzzi again. Believe it or not, all that work will have been worth it...I'll keep you posted on how it goes.