Thanks for all of the prayers and kind words for my granddaughter. I talk to my DD daily, and Zoë is making progress. She actually took a few steps yesterday. They are hoping before long that she will be able to get around without too much pain. I'll be going back to Baltimore in February to help my DD after my DSIL flies back to Hawaii. Hopefully he will be able to get the transfer!

I would trust your own testing vs. the pool store's results. If your CYA is 90 then your FC target should be 10. You can go up to a "shock" level of 35 and not have any issues. We had some raccoons use our pool as their toilet once and I raised my chlorine level fairly high just to be on the safe side and held it there for a day and it quickly went back down to my desired level. We live in sunny Florida though so it gets burned off pretty quickly. I agree on the partial drain of your pool since your CYA should really be around 60. The continued use of the trichlor pucks will just cause your CYA to gradually increase again over time.

April, thanks for your appreciation of the light fitting!! It was obviously meant to be - about five years ago when living in our last house (Wiltshire, England) we saw three of these lights - varying sizes - in a flower shop in the nearest town. DH and I both fell in love even though it was a bit contemporary for our tastes, lol! The lights weren't for sale but were fixtures in the shop. We asked where they'd been sourced but no-one seemed to know. A few months later DH was trawling a car boot sale (weird English Sunday pastime, ha ha!) and spotted *our* light across a field full of cars. It was acquired for the princely sum of £15 :)

I've been with the same company since 1989, and so we are very familiar with each other by now, but it was not like that in the beginning. When I first met my boss, I felt an instant rapport with her and felt like we were meant to be together. When I looked at her furniture, I thought to myself, "These are the exact same proportions I would use," and so I knew from the beginning that we had a compatible design style/sense. It took her a little longer than it did me to realize this, but once she did, she trusted me with all new designs. Kevin has some good friends at work, and a couple of the them live not too far from us. One has offered to help cook and help with grocery shopping, if necessary, but I think I am recovered enough by now to handle shopping. I just cannot get anything heavy yet, but that will come in due time. As for the garden, I will hire help probably in October. It would nice to have him sooner, but he is my friend in Sacramento, and I have to work with his schedule. I don't trust the local landscapers here. I could possibly find a good landscape architect here, but that would be expensive and more than we need right now, although I'll keep it in mind for the future. It depends on what we end up doing in Palm Springs. I think Kevin will be much happier when we can buy a second home in the Palm Springs area. We'll probably end up in Cathedral City (Palm Springs adjacent but not walking distance), and hopefully Cathedral Gulch. This won't start happening until next year, but it's something to look forward do that I think might help Kevin feel better. What is odd is that so many people ask us if we are twins, but I am 15 years (+3 weeks) older, and I think this must be very insulting to Kevin. First people ask us if we are brothers. Then they ask if we are twins. Then they ask which one is older, which is the worst question of all. I've afraid that Kevin is going to appear even older after this ordeal, but if he can have a week-end house in PS, then I think he won't mind so much. I don't know yet how I will look after my full recovery, but I am keeping plastic surgery as an option. I've had hospital technicians tell me that if you live in Los Angeles, then it is almost mandatory. When I had a bike accident that cut my forehead, they would not release me from St. Johns until I interviewed with a plastic surgeon. Back then (around 1996) I did not care about having a small scar or two on my forehead, and now it's barely visible anyway. If anything, what I can see of it makes me look more rugged, I think. I wear bike helmets now. Sorry for rambling - I'm having trouble sleeping some nights, and after just having seen Kevin, I am feeling even more anxious. I think I will be able to help him with most of what he needs, but he is very private and introverted and often likes to be by himself. I hope he will spend his alone time in the back yard instead of his bedroom, but for now, I know it is painful for him to sit in a chair, and I expect that to last for a while. I could see the evidence of the surgery that had been done, having to remove part (or all) of his sphincter, which I mentioned before but had not seen evidence of before. He's going to be on disability for about three months, I think, but since he has been paying disability insurance for many years, he will get paid pretty much his normal salary - from the insurance. However, they deduct Californian disability payments, as California is fairly generous with these payments, and so Kevin will have to apply for those as well - since the payments will be deducted whether he receives them or not. He cannot file for California disability until he gets out of the hospital, but I think he knows how to do this.