Hypercritical Dan Housman: Memorial day weekend by the pool

Memorial day weekend was one of those times when life goes by so fast and so fluidly that there is no time to document it either in words or in pictures. We spent the whole weekend trying to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather by hiding out near swimming pools. On Saturday we went to JT’s pool party and I saw a glimpse of the future. My future is a swimming pool filled with little girls age 2-10 bobbing up and down and diving in from the deep end screaming, cutting their lips on concrete, and eating Popsicles. It isn’t a bad future but not one I had foreseen until just now.

Jeremy and I decided to take an epic bicycle ride out to Marshfield on Sunday from Brookline to the house. I took my old mountain bike and Jeremy was riding his slick road bike. I figured we’d be even since he has two bad knees and is out of shape while I am in a little better shape. I learned a few things on the trip.

My bicycle is much slower than a road bike on any downhill or straightaway. Thus 32 miles on an old mountain bike is about 45 miles on a road bike.

There is a whole world of people living in places like Quincy and Dorchester and they live in real homes not too different from the rest of the western suburbs. They are a mix of oddly gentrified and still low-income locations but they once were something akin to Brookline or another city neighborhood.

Bicyclists tend to wave to each other when they pass and say things like ‘good morning’.

Mark from work is teaching his son to drive somewhere outside of Quincy. We passed him and he looked astonished to see us.

The smartest and most enjoyable thing that I did was to place a full load of ice and water in my camelback

Upon reaching the farm we spent a good chunk of the day debugging the pool system. The heat wasn’t coming out from the vents and we had to do all of these steps before it really started pumping out hot water:

1. Unhook the Polaris robot. It was full of sticks and leaves and wasn’t getting much suction.
2. Turn off the pump for the whole pool. Take out the filter. Spray it in reverse with a hose to clear all of the leaves blocking it.
3. Turn the heater up to maximum.
4. Turn the propane on for the heater using the propane tank.

These would seem obvious but it took about five hours with various head scratching and discontinuous new theories to come-up with new solutions to the problem of why the heat wasn’t coming through properly. Luckily it was hot enough for the water to be refreshing even without the heat.

We rushed back to Bedford to celebrate an anniversary and a birthday. I saw the funniest video in a long time on Matthew’s computer. It was clip about Scare Tactics where they scammed some guy into believing a genetics lab for animal testing had a rat-boy. I found a copy of it here.