Confusion

The more we know, the more confused we get.  I'll explain that statement in a moment.

What we DO know for sure is that we are painting Gladys in the right way.  We have had three different professional painting centers tell us to remove the old paint, patch, seal, and finish with two coats of paint, and that is what we have tried to do with every inch of this house outside.  To that end, we got up this morning and added the second finish coat to the rest of the house.  The wall painting, except for a little touch-up work, is now complete. (Sigh of relief.)  Naturally, that means that we have the dreaded soffits and fascia left.

The completed paint job blends exterior cables into
the paint.  We need to replace the downspouts, and then
only the soffits and fascias await our attention.

After rolling the final coat on the walls, Rick climbed the tall ladder once more to put on the first coat of finish paint on the south side soffits.  Once he gets the second coat on tomorrow, we are almost done using the tall ladder.  He still needs to caulk around the HVAC unit vent, but then we can hang the tall ladder away for a while.  Hooray!  Rick does not like being on it, and I do not like him on it.

This wall looks so much better now that one unified color
hides evidence of where holes were patched and telephone
boxes and cables were removed.

Oops. I forgot that he needs the tall ladder to access the roof of the house, too.  We need to paint the electrical mast so that it does not rust out.  The neighbors have even painted the soil stack pipes to prevent them from rusting.  Ah, Florida's moist air is so wonderful!

While Rick was up painting the soffits, I started to excavate a tree root that was causing grief to our landscape service.  We talked to Shell yesterday, and she mentioned that she always has to mow around one specific protruding root.  We know that the root in question is from the dead holly tree that we removed a couple of years ago.  The tree service did a crapola job of actually grinding down the stump.  They did not even properly remove all of the resulting ground mulch from that area, so we now have a mound of mulch, dirt, and weeds that make the yard even more uneven than usual.

This chunk of root is just a forecast of the work that awaits
us when we start to dig holes for the fence.  The yard is
criss-crossed with roots from old and still living trees.

Once I got into the rotting roots, I ended up filling one whole 30 gallon bag with just chunks of root, root fibers, rotting wood, and bark.  I started on a second bag, and then hit the main root that we have to remove.  I dug around that root but finally gave up.  It is firmly connected to other roots and probably goes down much further than I care to dig.  I am hoping that Rick can make short work of it with a persuasive SawsAll application tomorrow.

After lunch, we set out to see how much trees might cost us in the fall.  We went to a nearby nursery.  Their stock looked very good and healthy, and we got some ideas of what kinds of trees we might plant.  Although Art suggested an elm, we know that the tree is deciduous, so it will not have leaves for most of the time that we would be down here in the winter.  That is the same reason we do not want to plant a crepe myrtle.  The trees are beautiful when they leaf and bloom from April through November, but that means we would only see that beauty for a few short months. The woman at the nursery gave us some other suggestions, so we have a lot of planning and decisions to make before we take our old trees down and try to replace them in the fall.

Then the discussion turned to irrigation systems, and that is where the confusion starts.  No nursery in the area will guarantee their plants, trees, or work unless a homeowner has an irrigation system.  One nursery worker that we talked to was totally opposed the reclaimed water.  He said that we would get the water from the Pinellas County site (which we do not believe is true), and that the water clogs up the heads and homeowner's irrigation systems all of the time.  He also said that he did not trust the quality of the reclaimed water.

Rick had already talked to the plant manager at the city's reclaimed water plant, and the manager said that they treat the local water at that local site.  The payment system for the city's reclaimed water is different than the payments for reclaimed county water, so we believe that the two systems are not from the same source. The city plant manager was fairly confident that their system delivers fairly clean water, and that using reclaimed water offered very few, if any, health risks if a person used it in a sensible manner.

The man at the nursery said he used regular city water, to the tune of almost $90 a month, to keep his $20,000 gardens at his home irrigated.  He was very negative about reclaimed water, saying that it was sewage water (true) and that it posed health risks. The woman working at the nursery was sort of middle-of-the-road in her opinion. She said that some systems clog up, but that the health risks probably were not all that dramatic.  She suggested that we have a professional put in a city water system, and that way they could come out to the house and check the filters every four to six weeks.  Yeah, right.  I'll just contact a service and write a check from my bottomless bank account.  Oh, wait. Slight problem here.  I do not have a bottomless bank account. Darn!

Thus our confusion.  Is reclaimed water safe if we take normal precautions?  Is putting in reclaimed water practical, or will it just clog up every month?  Is using reclaimed water better since we can water three times a week while with city water we can only water once a week?  Who could we get to check the filters monthly while we are gone?  Would we ever consider using a city water system?  If so, would we be comfortable leaving the water on while we are gone? How much would it cost to get it installed, and what monthly service charges would we have to cover?

Is saying "to hell with it all" and just buying the trees and shrubs in November and watering the daylights out of them until May our best bet?  Steve and Chris do not have an irrigation system, and most of their vegetation and trees survive quite nicely.  I agree with Chris that what survives deserves to be in my yard, and what does not survive should not be a part of my landscape.

Rick is overwhelmed, so he is crabby about it all.  He says we will not plant anything, and then we will not have to worry about spending money on something that will die.  Grump, grump, grump.

We have some decisions to make.  I am not sure that spending money on any type of irrigation is a good thing.  I would rather buy another good hose (so we have one for the front yard and one for the back yard) and a couple of sprinklers, and just buy trees in November and water them until May.  That is what Art suggested before he saw that we could hook up to reclaimed water.  He is all for reclaimed water because then we could set it up for year-round watering without having to keep municipal water active while we are gone, but he did say that trees probably would do just fine if we bought them in November and watered them according to schedule until we left in May.

At that point, Florida is getting into the rainy season, and I guess I would just trust God to take over at that point.  After all, if you cannot trust God, who can you trust?