During the rains on Friday, Michael went to rent a pressure washer and spent most of the day pressure washing in the rain. The guys at the rental place questioned his wanting to work in this weather, but when he explained what a good idea it was to use the water from the cistern to pressure wash while the cistern was being refilled with water, they totally agreed with this brilliant idea. He was pretty soggy out there in his raincoat and boots. The paint chips from the ugly old brown floor paint stuck to him all over. It took him all day, but the porch came out great and he got all of the crud off that side of the house, too.

Wreggie and his friend, Ty had arrived from NC on Wednesday night, and one of their vacation projects would be to install a venting unit the roof of the Pickled Greek kitchen to remove some of the heat from the cooking. Last week, Aaron said it was 140 degrees in there !!  A little ceiling prep got done on Saturday, but they didn’t cut a hole out, since there would be people working in there that night. They’d wait until Sunday to actually install the vent.

Saturday morning, Michael started working remotely from home on the webcam for the Greek that he a Wreggie had been working on together. That was another of Wreggie’s vacation projects. After Wreggie and Ty played a little with the camera over there, too, they took off to go snorkeling. Michael was having trouble with working remotely, so he went down to the restaurant for the rest of the afternoon.

Michael and Wreg had been conspiring to put in a webcam there since before it even opened, but the owner didn’t want them to. However, since the “incident”, a couple of weeks ago, the owner has changed his tune. Now there is a webcam hooked up which faces the front door and records the comings and going of everyone in that spot. But with internet fluctuations during the stormy days,  Michael continued having trouble getting it to work the way he wanted it to. Eventually, since we had dinner reservations for 7, he headed home at around 6.

Just as Michael was coming home to get ready to head into town to go to Galangal for dinner, the storm came back, poured more rain all over everything, and there was thunder and lightning enough to make power go out at the restaurant, scare the dogs again and make us cancel our dinner reservations.

The Greek’s generator  had a dead battery, so Vinny got his jeep close enough to it to jump start it, and they were set to serve.

I was all dressed and ready to go to dinner, and as I walked into the kitchen, I walked into a puddle. I thought that one of the dogs had had an accident, since they were so scared of the thunder, but quickly realized that our cistern had started to overflow into the house. This was a first! We’ve had a lot of rain storms, and we have a large roof and a small cistern, but because, in the past, we’ve had old, leaky, flimsy gutters, excess water would spill out and not overwhelm the overflow pipe.

Well, now we have nice new extra large gutters and downspouts, so a LOT a WATAH was getting into that underground water tank. So much that it started coming into the house in the storage room which also houses our fancy shmancy inverter to change DC current from the solar panels into AC used by all of our appliances and ceiling fans, etc. Yikes!

I reminded Michael that we had the downspouts installed so that if this happened, we could remove a cap and the water in the gutters would immediately drain out into the yard and not make it to the cistern. So he got the wrenches and went out to fix the problem while I used lots of towels to sop up the water which had come into the dining/living room. We then put a small fan into the storage room to dry out the  floor and damp boards underneath the big batteries that store some of our excess electricity. Whew!

Sunday afternoon, we all went snorkeling at Tamarind and saw three different hawksbill turtles! And lots of fish, too.

Monday, we went west to snorkel out to the wreck of the North Wind. We had lunch at Sunset Grill (yum) and then I had to head east to go to work. They went to the crab races in town and I met them at the Deck Bar. After a nice dinner at Rum Runners, we were tired and came home.

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