Dog surgery, a hail storm and pool equipment failures

Sometimes I think the title of this blog should be something similar to Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

The last month has been full of craziness, which as you should have come to expect by now, is nothing new.

To start off, it took us two weeks of cold showers to get the new water heater installed. Par for the course.

Then the little crazy black dog had to have emergency bladder surgery to remove a ton of stones that filled, well, her bladder. See the pink circled area…yeah, all stones. No wonder she kept having accidents all over our bedroom. (*New on the list, replace flooring in our bedroom asap!)

If you’ve ever passed a stone, you know something the size of a grain of sand is torture. Below is what the vet took out of her. Let me just state that she is 9lbs.

The pen is for scale. Please don’t ask me why we now have a pill bottle full of dog bladder stones –my kids think they’re “cool.” I can’t even.

But considering what we paid to have them removed, I’m hoping they’re akin to gold nuggets, so maybe I will put them on our mantel and display them properly. They would be the most expensive piece of decor in my house.

And the vet put her on Prozac, because IT. WAS. TIME.

For the love of all things holy…. it was time. Although, I’m starting to think it might actually be more effective if I took it. Lol!

And just to keep things interesting, we had a big storm come through with ridiculous sized hail.

As you can imagine, our roof was totaled. We also had 3 broken windows. I’m actually surprised that’s all we ended up with! So something that wasn’t in the budget, must once again be forced somewhere into the budget. But that’s how these weather-related things happen for everyone. Not the money-pit’s fault there.

The bonus we got from that storm…as if forking out a $7k deductible wasn’t enough (emergency fund people…you need one now–and we apparently need a bigger one), was our pool pump stopped working.

So the pool sat and turned green during the week we waited for the pool company to come out to replace the pump. And frogs moved in. (Where do they even come from and how on earth do they show up so stinkin’ fast???)

Of course, when the pool company got here and we flipped the pump on, it was like taking your kids to the doctor…the symptoms miraculously disappeared.

So the recommendation was shock it and let it run for a couple of hours, shut it off and clean the DE filters the next day, then keep the pump running and keep the pool at shock levels, backwashing when the pressure increased, until it cleared.

Fantastic! I felt like we dodged another bullet to the budget. I was elated!

Of course that didn’t last.

I literally left the pool running for about 30 minutes while I went and picked up kids from school.

And I came home to water flooding my backyard and driveway.

Apparently the pressure spiked (I’m sure something got clogged) and the filter blew up! Below was the quick picture I snapped after shutting off the pump. If you look close, you can see the water pouring out of the middle.

I can’t imagine how far out it shot when it blew up.