Projects at the lake.....

What a busy day here at the lake place.......  It started in the middle of last night when one of the 7 smoke detectors began its chirp to let us know of a bad battery.......  Loyce and Chris went off to Wal Mart about 10 PM leaving me here with the grandkids...

They purchased 6 batteries as I thought that was the number of detectors we had.  I was wrong.......!  But by the time they got home the dog gone thing quit chirping.  We ended up going to bed without finding out which one it was.  We didn't want to wake the kids either.

Well......... at about 4:30 it began to chirp again and low and behold it was the one in OUR bedroom.  I just covered my head with a pillow and tried not to listen to it.  That's kind of hard so by about 7:30 we were up changing batteries..  That's when we found out we were one short...

In the mean time Chris began working on the Jet Ski that we couldn't get the oil filter off of last fall.  Well nothing had changed as we couldn't get it off now either.....  We went to town and got a much stronger compression filter wrench and another smoke detector battery and started again to remove the filter..........  Couldn't budge it!  Just crushed the side of the filter can with the wrench.......

Now I know we need professional help, so we hitch up the trailer and ski and go for our dealer.   He explains that it takes a special brass tool to take off the filter.  He has one and lets us try it on our ski out behind the truck in the driveway.  The tool is $45 because it is made out of brass.......  Our filter was too bent up and crushed to get the tool on correctly and we ended up dropping  the tool into the bottom of the hull under the engine.......

OK that's it,  Chris you give up!  We are leaving this machine here to have the nice folks change this filter for us even if we end up not being able to use the ski today or even this weekend!!!  Chris said he felt defeated as we were riding back home.....  Well defeated yes, but we are smart enough to know when to pay for services we can't accomplish for ourselves.....

We moved on to the project of cleaning the pontoon boat, which took most of the rest of the afternoon. And even that turned out to be not so good as we found a large starling nest in the rolled up canvas top of the boat.  And when we unrolled the top it dumped massive amounts of bird doo all over the inside of the boat we had just cleaned!!  Straw and feathers flew into the breeze!

Needless to say we were quite happy tonight to head into town for an Imo's Pizza and a couple of libations...  The kids seemed to like the thin and crispy style pizza with the provolone cheese too, since the 7 year old told us she had 5 pieces....  There wasn't anything left of two large pies......

So that was Saturday of our Memorial Day Weekend.

Retired Rod