Spiders leaves and beach balls.

This house we are house sitting has a rendered exterior, so has lots of little nooks and crannies. Around the windows, they are metal framed windows, at this time of the year the spiders are haviing a ball. So a little while back we had a zap the spider day, doing all the cobwebs, and spraying all the window edges with a specially made fly spray to keep the spiders down. It seems to have worked, because we have seen few spiders webs around for the last week or two. We have had one or two inside, but nothing big yet. One of my least favourite things about Aussie is the spiders, especially the huntsmen, who can move at the speed of light. Personally I reckon they should have been made with little bells on, so you can hear them coming. The worst part is that one minute they are not there, and the next minute they are, no fanfare, no horn blowing, just looking at you with the intention of scaring you half to death.  lol.

The other thing that needed doing was clearing the gutters. Because this block of land has such tall gum trees all around the house and pool, leaves are constantly falling, especially in this windy weather we have been experiencing. This house has a sort of gutter guard which is really good, it means the gutters don't fill up, but even so the leaves all congregated along the guttering and look a bit messy. So today we have a lovely clean roof, after our son in law and Peter cleaned away all the leaves. It looks really good. This is often a pretty time consuming job, but with the leaf blower the owner has here, it was quite quick work really.

As for the beach balls, well its been a scorcher today and the next few days are going to be very hot too, with some storms forecast. So it was into the pool about 3pm. With this wind, there is heaps of bits and pieces landing in the pool all the time from the tall gum trees all around, but we have got it down to a fine art now.

I take out a kitchen sieve, and I slowly get in skimming the top of the water picking up all the bits and pieces. While I am doing that Peter is using the longer net thing and skimming the bottom and getting rid of the leaves etc that have fallen right down to the bottom. There is a creepy crawly thing that does it's thing, but it can't get rid of all the stuff on the surface. It doesn't take too long before its nice and clean and we can spend a bit of time playing in the water. We have some brightly coloured balls floating on the top to discourage the ducks, so we get a bit of excercise heaving the balls all over the place. Around 3pm is good because part of the pool is in the shade and we aren't in the full sun all the time.

I think it's going to be swimming now most days. Tomorrow is supposed to be 37 degrees. Yay for a nice cool pool.