Since I’m giving updates about things in general, I’ll fill you in on two fronts. If you’ve ever had small flea-sized bugs eating your chocolate stash, read on. And I’m finally writing an update to our 7-month saga of our backyard . . .

Bugs

I wrote up on my blog the other day that I’d discovered a LOT of little black bugs dining away on my chocolate in the pantry. Last week I cleaned out many pounds of chocolate (varying kinds from chips, squares, bars, large bars). [Never let it be said that I ran out of some kind of chocolate I needed when the inspiration hit me to bake something!]  It pained me to throw away all that stuff, but I surely wouldn’t eat any of it if these bugs (and a few tiny white worms) were even munching away on the other end of the bar. I know, we consume lots of bug fragments every day with food we eat, but I don’t ever do it intentionally. I made a trip to the Container Store the other day and bought some sealing-type plastic boxes (hopefully they seal well enough to keep these little critters OUT). So today I began cleaning out the shelf the chocolate bin had been living on. Well, let’s just say that my housekeeping skills have been lacking. It’s been 18 months since the kitchen remodel was done, and I hadn’t cleaned those shelves since. And it showed. But what was ON those shelves was not dust particularly, but bug bodies, live bugs (yes, more of them) and all kinds of detritus from said bugs and other bugs. The moths/bugs that thrive on wheat-based food/flours were in evidence too. Dave helped me, finally, when I’d just about exhausted my energy schlepping bottles, cans, boxes, bags of stuff from the pantry to the island. I smashed hundreds of the little black bugs. They’re not hard-shelled, so they squish fairly easily. But I’m quite certain I haven’t gotten them all.

Once Dave started helping me we discovered them – both the flying type and the little black pinheads in lots of places. I threw out nearly all of the remainder of my chocolate (including all the bars of Scharfen Berger chocolate I bought at the factory last year). These were the packages that were on the other side of the pantry that I THOUGHT weren’t affected. Uh, no way. The bugs were all over it. In crevices in the packaging. I’d open a package and they’d be in the folds inside, AND having a smorgasbord on the chocolate itself too. And leaving piles of their poop behind. Then I decided I’d better look into the grain bins I have (just big plastic unlidded boxes I use to house various types of beans and grains). I’d gone through all that stuff a few months ago when I discovered the flying critters in there. Well, they’d gotten desperate for wheat food, and had delved into the imported French lentils, for whatever reason. There were dozens of the flying ones inside a tightly sealed plastic box of polenta cornmeal (perhaps that’s where the critters came IN to my kitchen, since there were a couple hundred in one small container). They weren’t really eating the lentils or the cornmeal I found out, but they liked living in the bags or bin. Then we found them in most of the opened boxes of pasta. They weren’t eating the pasta either, but they’d made nests in the bottom of the boxes. I wasn’t enamored with trying to sift out the detritus, so all that went into the trash too. About the only good thing about this exercise was that I have a bit more room on my pantry shelves now.

The Backyard

I know . . . the back yard looks lovely, doesn’t it? That’s new brick coping around the pool and a new pebble-textured plastering job in the pool itself. But first, backtrack a bit. I think it was in January or February that I mentioned that we were having drainage problems around our house. We live on a hill, as you can see from the photo. If it weren’t for the cloud bank out in the distance you could see the Pacific Ocean about 10 miles out there. I could write several chapters of a book on the stages of drain repairs around here about that. We did get it fixed. We think. Then there is the pool (and separate spa) - we had a couple of run-ins with the county about permits, but eventually paid the piper to get them. All we did was re-plaster our pool and spa and the permits cost us upwards of $2000. In the process they were quick to inform us that if and when we replace a water heater, a permit is required. Or if we replace a single or multiple windows, a permit is required. Or replace a garbage disposal. I mean, a garbage disposal, for heavens’ sake? We were, to say the very least, astounded. [In case you hadn't heard, our county and our state - California - are in serious financial difficulty . . . we've concluded the powers-that-be have decided  homeowners needs to bear a significant brunt of paying up . . . the legislators can't get a tax increase passed, but they sure can raise fees.] Anyway, back in February we had a bunch of deep holes (shafts) dug around our yard – I think I posted pictures of one of them. We were trying to figure out where water was standing underground. We finally discovered where (just to the left of the pool in the picture above), although we only HOPE the drain repair has rectified it. We won’t know until next winter when the rains come.

So what exactly did we have to do to finish this job? The drains were repaired about 5 months ago. We didn’t have to have a permit to do that! But the pool – we had to install a second drain in the bottom of the pool (a safety code). We had to install a second self-closing gate on the other side of the house. We had to put a new lock on the fence gate at the bottom of our hill. And we had to pay for an inspector to come and look at the work three times (that alone was about $200 per pool – and spa - per visit, since we also get to pay his mileage and the time it takes for him to drive here). We didn’t have to re-fence our property, fortunately.

So about 5-6 weeks ago we thought we were “done” with the pool and spa. Then about a week after the last worker-bees left we noticed our spa was losing water. I won’t belabor it – somehow the skimmer had developed a crack (probably from all the jack hammering that had been done to remove brick coping and the plaster). That cost $1500 to replace. The next day the spa lost 4 inches of water. The worker-bees who had replaced the skimmer had jack hammered one of the Jacuzzi jets, so a hundred or so gallons of water (I guess) had drained into the soil around the spa. There were a number of expletives-deleted words said about then. That got repaired the next day at no charge. We thought THEN we were done. Wrong. Two weeks later we noticed the main pool was losing water. A lot of water. Dave went to the deep hole that’s closest to the main pool and sure enough, there was standing water in the bottom of the hole. We found out the skimmer in THAT pool had developed a crack too. We’ve now had the 2nd skimmer replaced (another $1500 for this one too). We hope, just hope and pray, that we’re now finished. And that we have no more leaks. It’s been nearly 7 months in the process. Meanwhile, our flagpole (the photo from my other post) is still leaning, and probably will continue to do so. We can’t fix that without removing all patio areas, re-grading, compacting and re-constructing. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars for that. We’ll live with a leaning flagpole, thank you. 

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Oh, one more thing – the person who was stealing by blog posts has ceased and desisted – her website no longer contains any content. It’s still there, but it’s empty. Thank goodness and good riddance.