a very pleasant day

[kareina]

Our plan for the day had been to spend most of it outside building walls in the earth cellar. However, we got woken up by a phone call at 08:00 from lord_kjar's dad wondering if they could come visit today. Of course we said yes, and decided to start our morning doing some of the housecleaning tasks that had been put off while we waited for them to arrive. I had time to clean both bathrooms and go pick strawberries while he cleaned his desk and got the upstairs vacuumed, and his parents arrived just as I finished washing the berries and cutting off the stems, so I put them into a pretty bowl and fetched some of the pretty raspberry filled cookies I had baked from the freezer and set them out to thaw, then went outside to greet the family.

His parents have two of their granddaughters staying with them just now (lord_kjar's sister's kids, who are in the 1.5 to 5 year old age range, and probably two to three years apart in age. Both girls have white blond hair--as white as mine was when I was a child, but I think they (especially the older one) spends way more time in the sun than I ever did, because her scalp is tanned golden brown under her hair, and it looks kind of odd to have the dark (for a Swede) skin with the white hair.

In the time that we wandered around the yard and discussed with the family what the plans are for the various projects in progress are the cookies had thawed, so we brought them, the strawberries, the last of the nut cookies I had baked last week and tea and coffee, outside to the table on the porch and enjoyed a nice "fika" with them. After the kids got tired of playing on the swing (which hangs from a board between two trees, and came with the house) I got out my bag of juggling toys and they had a grand time playing with the various koosh balls and juggling balls. In the depths of the bag they found a little princess finger puppet that I hadn't remembered was in there. It was a gift from corva's Bear-child, when he was all of three years old. That was the year they were living in Alaska, and on my birthday she came over to visit, but left her son at home with his dad. When she explained to the kid that she was going to a birthday party he insisted that he wanted to send me a present, since presents are an important part of birthdays (his birthday had only been a few months before, so he likely still remembered it), and he chose that puppet from his collection of toys for me. That was such a sweet gesture on his part that I have held on to it all these years later (he's 19 years old now). However, when I saw how much fun the older niece was having with it, I asked her "Vill du gärna ta prinsessan hem med dig?, and she replied "Ja!", so I gave it away. I suspect that he will be pleased to hear that it has gone off to a good home.

So we didn't get to yard work till after they left, around 14:30. Still, we managed to select some good large stones from the pile and did a bit more wall building in the earth cellar before it was time to break for dinner. We had thought of going back out after eating, but we were also getting pretty urgent for a grocery store run, so we opted to do that instead, and stocked up on all kinds of yummy things. Then we started having water issues, again, so he went back out to deal with it.

Water issues? Yup, I haven't written about those yet. This neighbourhood is just far enough out of town not to be on the city water system. Instead the houses in this corner of the neighbourhood share a common well, which has one pump that pulls our water up from 70 meters deep and puts it into a holding tank, which has a sand filter, and then a second pump takes it after the filter and circulates it to the houses at need. The other day we came home to find out that something had gone wrong with the sensor on the first pump so that it wasn't realizing that the destination tank was full, and it didn't shut off, but kept forcing water in and none of the houses was using water fast enough just then, so instead it was overflowing and running down the hill and across the field.

So we turned off that pump so that it would quit sending water out over the land, which doesn't need it, since we have had a reasonable amount of rain recently. A bit later the neighbour who knows most about the system came home, and he and lord_kjar disappeared into the underground room where the control system for the water is and messed around with stuff for a while to see if they could fix it. They eventually decided that they couldn't do anything about the pump that no longer stops on its own this weekend, since the stores that sell that sort of stuff wouldn't be open again till Monday, and they both stopped and returned to their interrupted evening plans. Some hours later we didn't have water in our sink, so lord_kjarwent back out to investigate, where he was joined by a number of our neighbours, to discover the second pump now had a new problem--the intake part of that pump had floated out of position when its tank was flooding earlier, and then when the water level started to drop because people were home for the evening and using water, the water level dropped below the intake valve, and so the pump no longer picked up water to distribute it to the houses.

Between them they managed to solve that issue, but we still have the problem with the fact that that first pump no longer shuts off when the tank is full enough, so until that one is solved it is necessary to go out there every so often and check the tank. When it is looking full enough we turn off the pump, and then go about our lives for awhile, and then later go look again, and if it is looking too low turn the pump back on again. Repeat as needed. Needless to say, I am looking forward to whatever is broken being fixed again, so the system goes back to regulating itself.