Since we’ve moved in, we’ve seen a lot of wildlife in our yard … and even what we haven’t seen, we’ve known has been there while we’re sleeping. We wake up in the morning to find the cat’s food bowl broken, flowers dug out of the pots on the deck, pool toys ruptured, or the water bags around the pool shredded and drug away. Last night was the first night, though, that we saw at least one of the culprits. Around dusk, a raccoon came sauntering down the driveway by the house and promptly made himself comfortable on the front step munching on cat chow.

Only about 15 minutes after we chased the raccoon away (temporarily at least – the cat’s bowl was empty and upset when we got up this morning), we looked outside and saw a buck emerging from the ravine. He stood on the driveway for a while and then meandered back down the hill.

I’m always amazed when we see wildlife like this in our yard considering that we live in the middle of a city … it really makes me wonder what else is roaming around our yard that we haven’t spotted!

… is just about the coolest thing ever!

We’d been researching pool robots for a while and we finally broke down and bought one a couple of weeks ago. We wound up purchasing the Aquabot Turbo T “Bearbot” and it seems to do a pretty good job. It crawls the bottom and sides of the pool, scrubbing them and vacuuming up any debris and also filters about 5000 gallons of water an hour in addition to what the normal pool filter is doing, so it helps the pool water feel cleaner overall in addition to making sure that the bottom stays clean.

For our 17′ x 34′, approximately 25,000 gallon pool, it takes about 2 hours for the Aquabot to cover the whole pool in a pretty random pattern that can be fairly frustrating to watch, but it seems to eventually cover all of the dirty spots. We don’t really have any problems with the robot getting hung up on anything, although we have a pretty simple oval pool with no ladders or anything, so it’s probably one of the simpler pools for the robot to clean.

Before purchasing the Aquabot, we did some research online for a bunch of different pool cleaners. We were between the Aquabot Turbo T, Aquabot Turbo T2, and the Blue Diamond robots and we wound up purchasing the Turbo T mostly because it was the one that we found in stock at one of the local pool stores. According to the salespeople at a couple of the stores we looked at and also according to what we’d read online, it sounds like it’s normal for all three models of robots to need maintenance relatively frequently, which is covered by warranty for the first few years, depending on the model. So, we decided that we would rather spend a little more purchasing a robot locally from a dealer that also services them rather than having to worry about shipping it back and forth to the manufacturer for service if we purchased it online.

So far, we’re pretty happy with the purchase. It’s saving a lot of time that we would be spending vacuuming the pool otherwise and it does a lot better job than what we were ever able to figure out how to do manually.

With all of the wet and stormy weather over the last couple of weeks, we consider ourselves really lucky to have faired as well as we did. We took only a small amount of water in our basement the night that it rained nearly 4 inches in about 2 hours, causing Interstate 80 to flood and be closed a day earlier than expected.

Our most substantial damage was actually to our yard. We had a small tree fall on the fence by the pool and lost a couple of pretty big branches from other trees; one of which was from a tree near our deck that used to make the deck feel like a tree house. It’s a lot more open now without the branch (and we have a much clearer view of the neighbor’s house), but I’m sure we’ll eventually get used to it. We’re just glad we didn’t lose the whole tree.

A couple of days later, significant rainfall caused water to stream down our driveway and over the edge of the ravine, resulting in a wash-out on the hillside. When we bought the house last fall, the previous owner had told us that this had happened once before (after he started dumping grass clippings into the ravine), but this was the first time we had seen any movement in the hillside. We’d been talking about needing to do something to shore up the ravine in that spot, but now the situation is so much worse that we’re not sure if our ideas of throwing broken concrete and old bricks down there will be enough to prevent it from getting worse. We started making calls to local landscaping companies this week to see if we can get some ideas for what can be done to prevent further washouts, but the two we’ve talked to so far both say it’s too big of a job for their companies. One of them suggested we give the city engineer a call to see if they can come look at it or make recommendations for the contractors they would use in a similar situation. I’m hoping to get a call back on that tomorrow … otherwise, we’re not sure how to proceed. If landscapers can’t do work like this, who does?

The large collection of hosta throughout our yard have taken a beating from the nasty weather also, with a lot of them having completely shredded leaves now, which is really sad since they were one of the prettier parts of the yard before!