Month: April 2020

Kyra has one of those hilarious inflatable T-rex costumes. She donned it yesterday for a game of pool. It was so funny to watch.

She said it’s really hard to see anything from inside the suit, so Rex didn’t do very well at shooting.

We’re looking forward to wearing it on the jet skis. Stay tuned.

All winter, I’ve been thinking how much fun it would be to sit in our hot tub. I’ve never owned a hot tub, and the one that came with our house has been sitting there, dry and empty, for six months. Mocking me.

I called a local hot tub place about a month ago to see if they could send someone out to help me start it up, make sure everything’s in working order, show me how to mix the chemicals, yada yada. But the guy said he couldn’t help me, because all non-essential businesses are closed in Montana.

Last week, on our bi-weekly trip to Kalispell for shopping, I saw a (different) hot tub store on the road and pulled a quick U-turn. Pepper and I went inside– it was open– and talked to the owner. Apparently he thought his business was essential, because he said it would be no problem to come down and help us out. Or, we could just buy a shiny new hot tub right off his sales floor! After a bit of salesman-ey talk, he finally sort of shrugged and said, “You know, I don’t really need to come down to help you. Just fill it with water, turn it on, and see what happens.”

Brilliant!

If it works, I’ll head back to the oh-so-essential store and get the chemicals I need; if not, then I haven’t paid someone to drive 45 minutes each way (trip charge!) and tell me it’s busted. After coming home, Kyra and I went to work. First we cleaned out the interior, which wasn’t actually all that dirty but had a bit of sandy residue everywhere.

Then I plopped a hose into the tub and cranked up the water. Ahh, fresh well water from 265 feet underground, always at a constant 55 degrees.

It took a while.

Finally, as the water level neared the top of the highest jet, it was time to turn it on.

The jets spurted to life and blew bubbles, just like they should, and I was thrilled. I set the temperature to 100 degrees, put the cover back on top, and walked away. The manual says it takes 18-24 hours to come up to the target temperature.

Unfortunately, when I returned a few hours later, the water was still 55 degrees. After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered that the main pump motor wasn’t running. I thought it was fine, after it started up initially, but maybe it burned out for some reason. In any case, I called the hot tub place and they said I should bring in the pump so they can take a look. We’ll do that tomorrow.

And hopefully in a couple of days, there will be a Hot tub, part 2 post celebrating our success.

Around here, the weather forecast changes pretty drastically depending on altitude. We have an enormous hill right in our backyard, and there are days when I can look up the hill and see it snowing, or socked in with clouds, while “down below” at our house it’s nice and sunny. NOAA gives forecasts mentioning snow, but only above a certain altitude, and so forth.

The other day I saw a great example of this: a snow line on the Mission Mountains. Notice the distinct line of snow in the trees. Pretty cool!

Pepper and Kyra built a wheelbarrow today. I came across this scene.

Apparently some of the screws were a little tricky…?

“Go big or go home”, they say. Well, we have a lot of wall space in the lounge of our party house, and our 70-inch TV seemed kind of small against it. But really big TVs are expensive– it’s much cheaper to buy a nice projector. So that’s what we did.

Now we can watch movies that literally take most of the wall. The screen is about six feet high and around eleven feet wide (150″ diagonal, if you’re doing the math). It’s a little hard to see during the day, unfortunately, but at night it’s awesome.

Here’s Kyra beside the screen, for scale:

I’m reminded of Weird Al’s famous song “Frank’s 2000-inch TV”, which includes the timeless lyric

The picture’s crystal clear and everything is magnified
Robert De Niro’s mole has got to be ten feet wide…

We pulled up a Robert De Niro movie to test this. It’s Stardust, one of my all-time favorites. Here’s his mole:

Okay, maybe not ten feet wide, but still pretty impressive.

Anyone want to see a movie on the big screen? Come on over!

Kyra’s running the table.

Since the big painting job starts this week, we want to avoid being in the house when the paint crew is throwing tarps over everything and the air is thick with fumes. Luckily we have an entire other house to move into! So we’ve moved some of our things to the party house, including our desks and computers. Here’s our “new” bedroom:

Don’t even get me started about that bedspread (which was left by the former owner). Wow. It’s so awful it defies words. To everyone who’s stayed in this bedroom to date, I’m really really sorry. I promise I’ll get a new comforter soon.

In any case, it’s nice to have a place where we can “live” for a week or two while the paint goes on. I’m excited for the upcoming transformation.

It’s finals week at BYU, so Kyra’s sitting in bed working on the test for her Personal Finance class. It has questions like “Steve bought a car for $15,500 with a 4-year loan at 3.9%. What are his monthly payments?”

She has a magic calculator that lets you enter things like “present value”, interest rate, and loan term, and it’s supposed to spit out the monthly payment. But the calculator itself is pretty confusing, and since she was getting frustrated I offered to help. I couldn’t figure it out either, and eventually downloaded the manual for the calculator to see if I could get it to accept the right inputs.

Both of us plugged in numbers but couldn’t match any of the multiple-choice answers on the test. She decided it felt pretty much like this:

Next week, we’re having the house painted. We’ve been agonizing over colors for a full week now, and after using little one-square-foot swatches without much success, we decided to get some two-pint samples and paint the actual walls. We thought we had some colors decided, but once they went on the walls and we could see them beside the wood trim, or in different light, we changed our minds. Three trips to the paint store later, we have ten samples in hand and we’re testing them all over the place.

That’s led to some crazy stripes of color on the walls.

The good news is we’re narrowing it down, and have only two or three leading contenders. But today is a grey, snowy day so the lighting isn’t ideal. We’re hoping for some sunlight in the next couple of days so we can see the colors better.

In the end, there will be several thousand square feet of walls and ceilings with this paint, so I sure hope we choose well…

Today was (mostly) sunny and in the 50’s, and I felt like it was time to break out the jet skis. Anticipating this, I spent about an hour yesterday de-winterizing them and making sure everything was in shipshape order (that’s a nautical term). We hitched up the trailer and headed down to Yellow Bay, which is the closest put-in point on Flathead Lake.

We let Kyra take the “fast” one, and she said she hit 46mph at one point.

We headed over to Wild Horse Island, which we’d last visited in October. And we saw… some wild horses!

I’m not sure how “wild” they are– I imagine there are plenty of people who hike around the 2,100-acre island, so they’re probably quite used to seeing humans– but we didn’t want to get too close.

Here’s a picture of the ladies in their sleek wetsuits:

We also explored a few other nearby islands. Shelter Island is privately owned and has an enormous house… I think their boathouse is bigger than my entire home.

Nearby Cedar Island appears to be uninhabited. We would’ve gone exploring but there wasn’t really a good place to beach our jet skis. The water level is still around nine feet lower than full pool (that’ll change in about a month).

Overall, a great time. We’re hoping to go out again tomorrow!