Pool Progress

We're on about day 90 since pool digging started, so I thought I'd post a progress update.  The yard is still in a fairly unpleasant state - but that's pretty much what we expected (although we didn't expect it for quite this long), there have been delays caused by Christmas, permit issues, rain, and other stuff that I don't understand.

Anyway, here's the pool, it's been tiled and had the coping put on - the sticky up bit you can see is the skimmer.


This is the wall that caused all kinds of delays with permits.  This will be filled in and then concreted on the top.

Given the rain, the pool is filling up with water. The light has been attached to the wire (on the right) and left in it's box in the middle, for about 2 months now.

These pipes will go to the roof, where the solar panels heat the water.

This is the filter and pump and stuff, with the trenches that have the pipes in them.  Hopefully they'll be filled one day.

They've finished building the wall, but there are a lot of bricks and things still lying around.  I'm not sure if they're going to serve a purpose, or if they'll take them away.

Here's another shot of the wall.

And some more wall.

Close up of the light.

This is the wall that was demolished to let the digger in,a nd which has now been rebuilt.  The new wall is a lot sturdier than the old wall, but it's a tiny bit wider, and so the garage door scrapes on it when it's opened.

The other side of the wall doesn't look so good at the moment.

Lights, action ...!

Here's a bunch of people filming what was (apparently) an advert for Transitions Lenses outside our house. It seemed to take about twenty people a couple of hours to film someone walking about 6 feet (presumably from shadow into sunlight), and delayed our trip to school for several minutes.

I did a quick search to see if the advert had appeared yet, and it seems that Transitions lenses has a Youtube channel. So if you all keep an eye on that, well, it will be very exciting. Obviously.

Solving the problem of too many pictures

My camera takes photos really fast. And it's digital, so taking photos is free. So sometimes I take a lot (and then the boys take a lot too). And then going through and deciding which to keep and which to throw away is really hard, and in the end it just gets easier to get bigger hard disks. Today, for example, I took 357 photos. I put 16 on Flickr, and three (I think) in this very blog.

So my solution to this problem was to put lots and lots of photos into a video. Then it only looks like one thing, and not lots of things. Then I'll make the pictures go really fast. And put some headache inducing transitions between them. And that will solve the problem.

At last for some values of solved.

Wile E Coyote(s)

Grandma is visiting, so we went to the Griffith Observatory, Grandma and the boys went in, and I took the dogs up the Mount Hollywood trail (which I'd failed to get to the top of with Oma and Opa). I went to the top (here's a picture of the dogs at Dante's View- I'm not sure what the structures were for, and why is it Dante's View, not Dante's Peak?).



It turned out that that didn't take long enough, so I headed down the hill, where we saw a coyote casually strolling across the path.



The boys and grandma were finished in the observatory so we went home. On the way we say a coyote (another? the same one?) standing much more photogenically by the side of the road.




And then, because it was still there, I took another.



Actually, because it just stood there, and because taking photos with a digital camera is free, and because I have a camera that can take photos pretty quickly, I took about 50. But they're all basically the same, and you get the gist from two of them.

Daniel wanted to know if we could take it home.

Grey Water

We got the nice people at Hey! Tanks LA to come and fit a grey water system to our house. The idea being that we have a ridiculously high water bill (higher than our gas and electricity bill), and that we have a lot of water that we throw down the drain (get it? Down the drain? Hahaha), so instead of throwing it away, we'll put it into the garden and turn it into avocados and guavas and oranges and bananas. (Well, sort of indirectly).

You have to be a teeny bit careful with grey water - not all plants like it, as it tends to be a bit salty - handily fruit trees like it a lot. You don't want to spray it around, it should stay under the ground, which means that you can't use it to water grass - because you can't spread it out that wide (well, without some more specialized stuff).

Another slight complication is that you don't always want your grey water to go into the yard - if you've put a load of bleach into the washing machine, for example, or if you've washed the dog in insecticidal shampoo it might be better having those nice people at the Hyperion treatment plant. So you put in a valve, so you can send the water down the regular drain.

The first stage was doing the plumbing under the house, which I attempt to show in these rather unclear photos. (It was dark, which made focusing a challenge). The first picture shows the valve, which is where all the pipes meet. The pipe goes out into the yard to the left when the valve is on, and to the right do the regular drain when the valve is off (it's currently off, 'cos they haven't do the outside part yet). It's not obvious, but the steel pipe at the bottom that appears to go into the valve has actually been cut, so it's not attached.

The second photo is from slightly further back - you can see how the original steel pipe in the foreground (which comes from the downstairs bath and shower) has been cut, and now heads to the valve, and back again. At the back is the pipe that comes from the washing machine, and I forget where the pipe is that comes from the upstairs bathroom. But it's somewhere near there.

The water from the kitchen joins onto the main pipe later - kitchen water (sink and dishwasher) tends to be a bit more unpleasant than other water, so it's not a good idea to use in the yard (or garden - I keep forgetting which word I prefer).

Views

You probably know that LA is famous for being a bit hazy and possible even polluted. Very, very occasionally, it is clear, and I've been waiting since we moved into the house (in March) to take a photo of the other side of the LA valley. Finally, the stars were in alignment, the air was clear, I had a new lens for my camera (a relatively ancient M42 lens, which cost about $50 from Ebay, and combined with a $10 adaptor gives the magnification [if not quite the quality] of something that would cost somewhere over $1000 if I wanted a new lens that fitted my camera without an adapter.

Here's the first one of the Hollywood sign. (It was slightly too early in the morning, and there's a bit of shadow on the H and the second O). It's cropped a bit.




Here's the second, which is not cropped, of the Griffith Observatory (click to make super dupe rbig:


It's a shame there weren't any people around there - I'm not sure if we'd have been able to see them. Google maps thinks the observatory is just over 8 miles away.

We got a new table

We bought an Amish table and chairs I don't know if the Amish bit means it was made by people without zippers, or if that was just the style. It did take forever to get made and delivered, and it seemed to come on a truck, not a horse and buggy.

We got it from JMX International - who were very, very patient about sending us samples and answering our questions every week for about 5 months. The chairs and table were made by different workshops, and they had to do an elaborate procedure to get the chairs sent to the table place to make sure the colors matched.

Pool, day 6 (18)

After the rebar was put in, we had a lull of 10 days, while stuff was ordered. But it duly arrived, and then people came to put the equipment into place, and do the plumbing and wiring.

Here's the pool, with some pipes and stuff in it.



This is what they always call 'the equipment'. Because it's just a filter / chlorinator, there's no heater, and it's much smaller than normal. The pool will be a salt water pool, which I don't really understand. The chlorine is attached to sodium which makes it salty - so it still has chlorine to kill the beasts that you don't want, but it's not all nasty and chloriney. And the water feels different too.



This bit is called the skimmer, it's where the stuff that floats on the top gets trapped and filtered out.



And here's the light. I still don't see how we will change the bulb.


The inspector (from the council) came yesterday to, inspect. He seemed happy with everything, except the fences, which he said weren't high enough, because they had to be five feet high - but they are five feet high, which confused me. The gates need fixing - they need to close and latch automatically - we knew about that.

We need to get pool alarms for the doors from the house fitted. I looked online at Amazon, and a couple of people mentioned in reviews that these alarms were approved by their council. That made me a bit nervous, so I went to a pool supply store, and bought them there, for $80 each. The alarms have to be high enough that a child can't turn them off - when you open the door, you have 7 seconds to press the button, and then 14 more seconds to get through the door and close it (at least, that's my understanding). You should not be able to remove the alarms without using tools - so no tape or velcro to attach them to the door. I had quite a hard time finding all those rules - the LA County website was pretty useless, but eventually I found the Los Angeles Design and Construction of Swimming Pools Regulations.

It's not obligatory, but we're also going to get a pool alarm, which will go off if anything large falls into the pool (like a dog or a child).

I have seen the future of bumper cars ...

... and I'm not happy.

When I was young (and, let's be frank, still) the purpose of going on bumper cars was to attempt to inflict injuries on people in the other bumper cars, whilst avoiding such injuries yourself.* The best way to do this was to hit people when they weren't expecting it, ideally when they were braced for a different impact. (When someone has just run into someone head on, they are braced for a forward impact - this is the ideal time to hit them on the side or back).'

Today we went to Santa Monica Pier. Bought tickets for the bumper cars, and then went to find them. But they weren't there. There was an empty tent.

Eventually I found them. And they weren't like proper bumper cars.

First, they get their electricity through the floor - no tall masts with exciting sparks on the mesh ceiling any more. (It's quite an elegant solution - I thought about how that might work for a while - it must be AC, not DC, I've decided. And would their be sparks if I were to drop a piece of metal there?)



Second, they are surrounded by inner tubes. When they crash, they just bounce off each other in a gentle, and not even potentially a little bit painful, fashion.



Because they are rubber, they don't slip past each other. Daniel discovered that you can pin someone to the wall, and stop them moving until the ride is over and then they cry.


*Obviously within the legal parameters of bumper cars - you could just get out and hit them if you really wanted to inflict injury.

Old Los Angeles Zoo

Ever since I first heard about it, I'd been meaning to go to the Old LA Zoo. The original zoo was built in the 1930s, and in the 1960s, it was realized that it wasn't really suitable for the animals, so they closed it, and built a new zoo about 2 miles from it. But the old zoo was just left - it's now an abandoned, derelict zoo. Which is kind of strange.

I'd imagine this was some sort of storage building.




And that these might have contained birds.


Notice how 40+ years of erosion have partially buried this cage.


One cage had a gate that still worked. The boys weren't strong enough to open or close it, which was tempting ...

Random people walking past cages.

This is above the cages. It looks like a chimney - I wonder if there was a heating system.





There was more, but it was getting dark, so we're going to have to make another trip. We also saw two coyotes, which made the dogs very excited.

Dog Tags

The dogs have a tag on their collar, with their name and our phone number on it. Then they have one from Southern California Golden Retriever Rescue (because they're not really our dogs, they're SCGRR's dogs). They have a tag with their microchip number on it (although I don't see why they need that, 'cos they've got a microchip) and they have a tag which proves they have a dog licence. Which makes a lot of tags.

They sort of jingle when they walk.

Day 5 (8) of the Pool

We're on day 5, or maybe 9, depending on how you count, of pool building. As in it's been 8 days since they started, and they've done 5 days work. I forgot to put a memory card in the video camera this morning, so we don't have an exciting video of people putting steel reinforcements in a hole in the ground.

But never fear, you can see some pictures.

From one end:



From the other end:



From above:

Day 4

Day 4 of pool construction. Not much happening today - partly 'cos it's been raining for the last couple of days, and the hole is now full of muddy water, so all they did was empty it. Oh, and they brought some metal bars.



We got a 9 page document from Mr Carlos Pools, telling us what we are supposed to do and not do while they're building the pool. It might have been more helpful if we'd had this when we started, 'cos it says things like "The plans and inspection card willbe placed in a plastic envelope ... DO NOT MOVE, REMOVE or DISTURB ANY OF THE CONTENTS. Leave the envelope and its contents exactly where left." I mean, why would we do that?

"DO NOT ALLOW DOGS TO RUN LOOSE AFTER THE EXCAVATION OF THE POOL ...". Oops. I picked up the poop, so maybe they won't know.

"KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS AWAY FROM THE EXCAVATED POOL, ... PARTICULARLY THE EDGES." Well, as long as they don't watch the video. Anyway, no one fell in, so that's OK.

Today, which is day 5 of work, but day 8 since they started, they're putting the steel reinforcing bars in.

Huge Hole

We've now got a huge hole in the ground, a pile of dirt, and a slightly moonscape-ish yard.

Here's the pool outline. The wood at the back marks the level of the water (or maybe the edge). It doesn't look level, but it is.


Dog in the hole.




This used to be our (relatively) lush green lawn. The pile of dirt is going to make a level deck sort of area.



They dumped a lot of the soil in other areas of the yard, to level it a bit. It doesn't really look like an improvement.




Alex thought the pile of soil needed water. Don't know why.

Still digging

When they started digging, they said they would be finished in a day. I thought that was optimistic. This is day 2, and they're coming back on Monday to finish off.

(With more random Youtube music.)

Pool is being dug!

They started to dig the pool yesterday.

The digging chaps - Luis and Jose, turned up at about 8:30. Chris (from Mr Carlos Pools) wasn't there yet - "He's always late" they said. They spent the time measuring and marking and stuff, while we waited for Chris.

Once we'd measured and marked, we realized that because we had to move the pool (because of the neighbors) we didn't have much space at one side, and there was a tree in the way - so we had to remove the tree. When we removed the tree, there was some paving that looked out of place, so we decided to remove that too. They were pretty flexible about all of this - and didn't seem to mind when everything had to stop while we decided whether to build a little wall (no - too expensive) and to put more soil in some places.

The people doing the digging seem to know what they are doing, they do lots of measuring, but they also think about what kind of soil goes where - when they remove the lower clay soil, they put that in the dump truck, when they remove the darker topsoil, they put that in the areas that are going to become lawn.

Anyway, here's a video. There's a nine hour video, a 10 minute video, and a 2 minute video. Given the average attention span of the reader of this blog I expect you haven't even reached here. But assuming you have, here's the 10 minute version (complete with Youtube's randomly chosen music).

Permits! Digging!

We have got permits for a pool (apparently - I haven't seen them, but I believe them when they tell me we have). They will come on Friday (that's a week today) and start digging. Digging should take two days - they might finish on Saturday, if we're nice to them, or might finish on Monday.

We want to use some of the soil to try to make parts of the yard less steep - but there is quite a lot of stuff in the way. Some paving stones, the compost heap, a weird bench thing (made of three pieces of stone - it's very, very heavy, and falls over and apart when I try to put it together). I wonder if we can just bury it.

Haze

LA is famous for it's haze and smog - this is actually (trivia fans!) an accident of geography - here's what the Freakonomics blog has to say about it:

air pollution in the region long predates the arrival of the automobile. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the first European to lay eyes on Santa Monica Bay, saw the area shrouded in smog from native campfires and named it the Bay of Smoke.

The haze is always worst in the morning, and then gradually clears up over the day. So I thought I'd record that with my video camera, and the haze would miraculously lift revealing the mountains and their famous landmarks (Hollywood sign, Griffith observatory) in all of their glory.

Problem is, of course, that when you start recording (at 1oam) you don't know if the haze is going to have lifted. So it didn't quite go according to plan. I didn't think you'd want to watch 10 hours or so of haze not going away, so I've speeded it up about 500 times to just over a minute. I realize this is still way beyond my average reader's attention span, but what can I do?

No pizza

We went to the Theodore Payne Foundation Nursery today, to buy some plants (they sell native Californian plants, some of which are endangered and which don't need much water) - but that's not what this is about. On the way the boys were hungry, so I went to buy some pizza. I went into Little Caesar's on Crenshaw, and all the staff were on the phone. I waited, and they kept on the phone, ignoring me. Eventually someone got off the phone, and wandered over to the register. They poked at it a bit, and looked in the drawers. Eventually they acknowledged my existence.

I asked if they had any pizzas ready. She sort of looked confused, and said no, and closed the door on the place they keep the ready pizzas. I asked if I could have a pizza, with the complicated selections the boys wanted (involving one quarter black olives, one quarter tomatoes AND black olives, etc). I spent a while explaining it to her - she didn't seem to get it. Eventually she said "We've got no pizza. We've got no money. We've been robbed."

Then two policemen came in. I said I'd return later (which wasn't true, but I didn't want to make her feel bad). As I was leaving I heard her saying "Two black guys ... semi-automatic".

Pool permits

Now we know about the pool restrictions, we are in the stage of planning and permits. The people at Mr Carlos pools will apply for a permit to build a pool from the city. The city might decide that we live on a hill (I'm not sure why it's something that needs deciding, but I won't trouble myself with that). If it turns out we do live on a hill (and I'd say it was pretty obvious we do) we'll need a soil grading report, which will cost $450 and delay things.
If we don't need a soil grading report, they'll start digging in (optimistically) 10-11 days. After they have dug the hole, then the inspectors from the city will come and do whatever inspections they do.
On Saturday, someone is going to come and put fences on the walls - the fences need to be 6 feet high - this is part of the inspection. We also need to get the gates fixed - they have to be self closing and automatically locking.