The people behind us, the people with the dogs, the people who have never taken any pride whatsoever in their backyard, have started cleaning it up and doing things to it. This is the yard where Hollywood spent the last few hours of her free range life. The yard where Brian climbed our fence, with heavy gloves and a ladder, and went into their almost empty above ground pool to save the life of a feral.
The same yard with the cocker spaniel that liked cats until the son moved back in, bringing with him an unspayed female weim, who got pregnant at least twice that I know of. There may have been a third time (I saw the visiting male in the yard), but if there was, she was spayed before she came to term. And that weim has a pretty strong prey drive. On more than one occasion, I saw a possum in their yard, just playing (?) dead.
For the longest time, the dogs had the run of the yard. Then, the people redid the fence and made a dog run at the side of the house. I think that was last year. Well, they recently got hot on doing something with a nice sized backyard. The old pool has been gone for a long time. And a couple of months ago, they brought in a little bobcat and started digging and moving dirt. Behind their garage, they’ve finally put in a lawn. Complete with sprinklers that they actually have on timers that work. (We used to joke that they must be expecting company, because they’d start watering the backyard for days in a row after months of not watering it.)
And they moved their dog run. Back to the fence. Right behind our pool area. Their dogs hear our cats back there and they run back and forth, whining and scratching, but that’s okay, because there’s a double fence. Chainlink on their side, wood on ours.
But one of the problems is that the dog run is right where the water runs when Brian cleans out the pool filter. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but it’s very, very nasty, dirty icky water. All the crud that the pool has in it that is filtered out is here. And it builds up to the point that the pump isn’t as efficient and it has to be flushed out every once in a while. And Brian, being the considerate man that he is, thought of something else he could do when he flushed the filter. He would attach a heavy duty hose to the outlet and the water would go through the outlet at the house into the sewer system. The outlet is off of the laundry room, the same drain where the washing machine empties.
So, he got it hooked up. And he started it. It worked until the force was so strong, the hose split. He needed to get a bigger hose, but this did the trick. All set.
He stayed by the pool, putting diatomaceous earth into the skimmer for the filter, watching the water level, adding chlorine and making sure all was working as it should. I heard him a little later in the kitchen, talking. I thought he was talking to the cats.
Then I heard him bellow “WHERE ARE YOU!?!” Oh, my, this can’t be good.
“I’m in here!” (the office).
“Get out here!”
I go running into the kitchen. I look into the laundry room. The laundry baskets, all four of them, are gone, out on the lawn. There is dirty, nasty, icky water all over the floor. It’s deep and it’s into the kitchen. It came in via the drain where the washing machine empties. This is pool filter water. And it isn’t pretty. He told me to look into the kitchen sinks. They were horrible, covered in muck. The dish drainer was full of this crud. It not only came up through the laundry room drain, it also came up through the sink (I hope the rest of the house is okay).
Brian goes the shop vac and started vacuuming up the water. I helped for a while, then he pulled the washer and dryer out and I vacuumed out quite a bit, then he came in behind me and started. I noticed all the cat pee on the wall (thank you, Georgie and all of your kitty cat friends) and got a dust cloth wet and added some Simple Green. When Brian left the house to empty the water from the shop vac tank, I wiped down the walls and the side of the dryer. There really wasn’t much room for both of us out there, so I left and started cleaning up the kitchen. And as luck would have it, it was time for DeeJay to get his fluids. But I couldn’t very well put him up on the counter, because it was pretty gross and I didn’t want him ingesting this stuff when he cleaned his paws. I got the counter cleaned, he got his fluids and his treats.
I had to dump out the litter box that was in there, because it had gotten a lot of water into it. When Brian finished, I started putting everything back where it belonged. And I started a load of laundry, because there were towels that needed to be washed. Imagine my surprise when I opened the drawer where I keep the towels that are put down for DeeJay to pee on and where I keep my dryer fabric softener sheets to find it, too, got hit pretty hard. I pulled out all of the towels that had been laundered the day before and salvaged as many dryer sheets as I could. The rest got tossed. Then I had to clean the drawer (my washer and dryer are front loading machines that we got for a real good price at the Sears outlet store and they’re on pedastals which double as storage.
This morning, the kitchen smelled kind of funky, so I ran water down both drains for a while, figured I’d put the dish drainer in the dishwashing machine and plugged both sinks and put bleach into each one. I let it set for a few minutes, then I pulled the plugs. I rinsed the sinks out well. So far, that smell is gone (it was the smell of wet laundry left in a pile for weeks, stale and moldy and just unclean). And I have to wash the floor, it’s still pretty dirty.
So, in theory, it was a good idea. It just didn’t work.
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