I usually awake on a Monday morning and see what is going on in my life. This morning I got bad news on my phone. One of my best friends’ mom died last night. She chose, if that’s possible, to die on the anniversary of the day her husband went to his reward about 10 years ago. Strange how things like that happens, not the dying. Shoot! We all have to die someday. Yet my friend’s mom fought like the dickens, even as she got weaker and weaker and started losing weight. She also contracted dementia, which made it tough to get her to eat or take a walk or converse on almost any subject.
My friend made a promise to his dad that he would make sure she got to stay in the same house they both loved until the moment of rapture. It was a difficult promise to keep. You see my friend lives in Atlanta and his mother stayed in the family home in Houma, La. He would go to Louisiana every other weekend to care for his mom. His job also required him to travel all over the world so occasionally, when he was out of town, he would have to beg one of his sisters to take his place. That was also difficult as they had their own families to look after.
Yet, no matter the problems he faced, he took his promise to his dad to heart and he made sure she was in her own bed in her own house when her name was called to go. I pray my kids will look after me with such love when I go.
How do you segue from that of such news to another? One of the pumps I use in my pond went out this weekend, so off to Lowe’s to see what their offering was in the pump department. I bought a small pump since it only runs one water activity. As easy as that sounds, nothing is guaranteed to be easy.
One evening we were using our iPads when I saw an article about changing the color of the water in my pond. I have mentioned before that algae forms so quickly that we really didn’t have clear water to watch the fish swim about. This fellow on TV said you could dye the color of the water with this stuff named Pond Dye.
So we sent off another offering to Mr. Bezos and received a quart of pond dye. The directions were pretty clear and one of the many folks that use it seemed to be pretty happy with the results that they got. Of course they were using the stuff in a very large pond probably about 20 times as large as mine.
They would explain what they were doing and then poured the entire can into their pond. It changed the water to a bright blue almost immediately and looked pretty cool. My sweet wife grabbed her iPad and ordered a small can. It was dark when it arrived, so we decided to just pour what we thought would be enough and went to bed anticipating a very cool looking pond. The best dose we could figure, since we had such a little body of water, was a cap full of the dye. Oh man! We were sure the pond would be beautiful. This, however, was not to be.
When we got up, you still couldn’t see the bottom of our pond because the blue dye was so powerful. The caution on the can told us that it was really strong. But what do they know? That fired me up and I decided to put a couple of water features hoping the blue would disappear soon. We also were a little put out because if it is spilled, it cannot be cleaned with anything we could find in our local hardware store. It wasn’t too bad and the spots on our sidewalk around the pond were not too big.
Life went on for a few months and we decided to throw the pond dye away because we had not been happy with it and it was too late to send back. So fast forward until this last Saturday and a cleanup of the backyard was due. I’m pretty good at making messes, but cleaning them up is a little different.
So as Saturday broke through the clouds, my beautiful Bride says she is going to put the stuff we want to keep into some plastic tubs as they will be less conspicuous. As she picked up this bag that had the dye in it, the lid came off the can. Blue dye started dripping out. No big thing, we could get that out pretty quick. Then we started noticing the blue was getting everywhere.
Lorraine isn’t quite screaming yet because she didn’t know where the dye was coming from. Then we noticed that the dogs were following us around and stepping in the little gobs of blue. I think it is fair to mention she was as hot as a firecracker. There were doggy footprints all around the backyard as the dogs didn’t even know what the problem was.
Lorraine was in full mode now. I ran down and bought some muriatic acid to try and get it off the concrete. It didn’t work much better than the Clorox and Spic and Span we were using. Now I was in the mess, although it was not my fault. I threw away a pair of shoes as did Lorraine.
Finally, the next morning the stains were gone. My little chunk of Heaven had returned. Then, as I walked into the house to make a sandwich, Lorraine came running in telling me I had to take off my shoes because there might be Clorox on the soles.
“It could stain our carpets!” she exclaimed. That, my friends was the end. I decided I had better get this written down or no one would believe what a mess a few drops of this pond dye could cause.
On the plus side, all this “stay at home” warning caused us to finally plant the flowers we had bought a few days before. The patio is clean enough to eat off of, and since I kept telling her the spots would someday go away, I am hiding in my room. I’m not sure what all I would have to do if she caught me.
God Bless.
