What’s that you say? The 7 Days theme today is COLD? Fine, I guess we have to go to Starbucks for an iced latte for me and a vanilla bean frappuccino for Annalie. All for the sake of art.

It got up to about 94F/35C here today. We’ll be going back inside our air-conditioned home now.

Can you tell how hot and sweaty I was when I took this photo? We just bought a new inflatable pool at Target that we thought was similar to the big green round pool we had last summer in San Diego. Well, we were wrong.

This one doesn’t have a bench in it, it doesn’t have nifty cupholders in the sides, and worst of all IT DOESN’T HAVE A DRAIN IN THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL. How ridiculous is that!? To empty the 3-day-old cruddy water I had to stand on the side, balancing very precariously, so the gross water and dead bugs and leaves and grass could flow out over my feet. It was far too heavy for me to pick up and dump without ripping the plastic till it was nearly empty, which I only realized after struggling with the half-empty pool for several minutes. Hence me being hot and sweaty and annoyed. And in this photo you can’t even see my rolled-up splashed-with-gross-water pants.

At least Annalie had fun swimming once it was emptied, rinsed, and refilled! Now I’m wondering why I didn’t just put on my swimsuit and join her.

This was another shot I rejected because I felt it did not accurately portray the level of my annoyance.

This isn’t really related to my 7 Days shot at all, except that I was standing on the deck when I took it. I just thought I’d share how unbalanced our deck looks right now.

See that big tree on the left, the one that hangs over part of our deck and house? It’s been dead for a couple of years, and we were told that it would be cut down soon after we moved in. Well, the guy who does maintenance on our rental house is a general contractor and a friend of the owners. He does good work, but he does it on his schedule. He told us a couple of weeks ago that he would be by “on Thursday” to cut down the dead tree. We moved our deck furniture and container garden over to the other side of the deck so they wouldn’t get inadvertently crushed. Apparently something came up, because no one ever showed up to cut the tree, and we have not heard from the maintenance guy. But we don’t want to move all our stuff back because the minute we do he’ll show up and we’ll have to move it all back.

Hey, wait…maybe we should move our stuff back, and then he’d show up to get rid of the tree.

This was the first and only photo I took for 7 Days yesterday. When I looked at the display and saw the photo, I thought, That’s it. I’m done for today. It’s rare to get such a cool shot in one take, I figured I’d better respect it.