Catching Up

Now that summer is winding down and the days are getting cooler, Mike has been able to catch up with some summer activities that for one reason or another kept getting postponed.

I looked out my kitchen window one afternoon and saw Mike with his pressure washer and a water hose in the backyard.  He was cleaning our vinyl fence.  Once he finished with the fence, he went on to clean the gazebo which also is vinyl.  Turns out that vinyl is more weather resistant than wood but it still gets dirty.  Both the fence and the gazebo look like new once more.

Then Mike spotted the hornets nest built near the roof line on the front of our house.  The hornets were not really bothering us but they were pretty near to the front door and the potential was there.  So we finally made a phone call to get an exterminator out to remove the nest.  It took the exterminator three visits to our house at daybreak before he was finally convinced he had eliminated the live hornet threat and he could climb a ladder to remove the nest.  Mike had to provide the ladder.

With all the rains we have been having this summer the level of the pond kept fluctuating.  Despite Mike's efforts to move our kayaks, paddle boards and pedal boats to high ground, we often found that one or move of them had floated off after a particularly heavy rainstorm.  Once I looked out my kitchen window to see the red paddle board floating right by the house.  It eventually drifted out of sight.  It takes two people and another boat to handle the retrieval process so the paddle board stayed missing until the kids came to visit one weekend.  

My relatively new latte machine has taken to working only sporadically.  Mike has been in correspondence with the manufacturer for weeks now.  Their last email said to ship the coffee pot back and they would replace it.  But then how would I have latte's in the meantime?  So we had to buy another bottom of the line latte machine to cover the transition period.  Thank goodness Mike has made my daily coffee fix such a top priority.  

Not all of Mike's summer projects are work related.  He also squeezed in some more fishing although only with Hunter's encouragement.  When Hunter comes over to fish in our pond he always wants Mike to join him.  This means that Hunter has caught quite a few fish before Mike even gets his pole in the water.  Hunter is usually gracious about this though and will adjust his fishing stats so Mike is not discouraged by the fact that Hunter is in the lead in the number of fish caught.  Hunter will subtract some fish off his total for the time it takes Mike to actually get his pole in the water.  Funny, how even when Hunter makes this adjustment, he still manages to catch more fish than Mike.  

I am very glad that Mike has had the time to complete all these activities.  I am not so sure that he is though.  All he ever says to me is that there is too much to do and too little time to do it.