melmar02

Am I the only one who had a love hate relationship with the idea of a cabin crawl? On one hand, I would love to see some of the suites we haven't stayed in, but on the other, I hate the idea of strangers in my own cabin. I think it would feel like having my house on the market too...I would want it to be neat and clean, but I know the kids and DH would care less. One of them might even offer to show everyone our dirty clothes hamper in the closet. ?

Thanks for checking @JLMoran. We've been below freezing for days and had some negative temps in the mornings; however, we've also been extremely fortunate and have kept power throughout. Most our area is without or still experiencing rolling blackouts. I need to start baking for Saturday's wedding tomorrow, so hopefully our luck holds. All faucets dripping with no issues there so far either. My sister lives 20 miles away and their power was out most of Monday. Brother in law had no power for over 30 hours and is now dealing with broken pipes. We've had 2 rounds of snow 3-4 inches the fist time and another couple inches last night. I guess the pool technically has water in it. A lot of them have frozen over in our area.

Just like pets, if you let the kids name the robo vac you potentially wind up with a lame name. Ours is called Sweepy...and he isn't very smart.

I love it. I hate when I'm on an excursion and see a ship in the distance that has some really cool feature on the top deck, but we're too far away to see the name.

No photos of the drive-thru reconnaissance?

Glad it went well. I hope you have a quick and painless (as possible) recovery.

So glad that fun > cold! Enjoy the weekend!

I'm so excited for you! What a great gift for your Dad!

We've hit a lull due to the weather. Like most of the country, it will be wet and freezing here for a week. I think it's a blessing in disguise because DH wasn't ready to order his outdoor kitchen equipment until now, and it will take about 2 weeks to get here. The only other thing that's happened is the forms have been removed from around the gunite and all the plastic tarp that was covering the fence was taken away at that time. So it still looks like a construction site, it's just not a messy construction site now.

Right! We just watched the last episode. When's the next (and sadly, final) season coming?

Speaking for all of us who pass out at the sight of blood, I appreciate the photo-less format.

Yeah...DH is an engineer and used to being in control of schedules and details so he's not thrilled. I probably should have made sure he took his blood pressure meds yesterday before I called screaming that they were tearing up our front yard. ?

So a few interesting things have come up, and it seems we're at the "I just need a Xanax" and add-on portion of our journey. ? The sprinkler manifold things (I'm obviously the technical one in our family) on the side of our house that we saved from a lifetime of darkness by moving the equipment pad were torn up by the ditch witch the plumbers used to dig the trench for the lines. There are bits of sad, mangled plastic up and down the side of the house. I panicked... we had just preserved them, and now it's a war zone over there. We have a few sprinkler zones listed in the contract to be repaired, but not this. I mentioned to the project manager, and he said, "Oh yeah, I knew that would happen". I asked why go to the trouble to move the equipment pad, and he said it's much easier to fix them in their original location than to re-install them from scratch in a new location, and that they would take care of it. When the plumbers came out yesterday to work on the water lines, they were in our front yard...far away from any place a pool water line would go...with their ditch witch. Again, I panicked because we're at the limit of the sprinkler zones in the contract. Not to mention that they are tearing up a swath of perfectly good grass across most of the front yard. Well, turns out they weren't using the cutting bit. There's this neat little attachment for the equipment that can snake its way under slabs of concrete. You know, like a driveway. Our water clean out line is in our front flower bed on one side of the drive way and the main water line is on the other. They were just getting from one side to the other and needed to back way up to get the machine going. There's a giant gouge across our front yard, but it's not as bad as when I initially saw it from an upstairs window. I didn't see any sprinkler lines had been exposed when I went out there, so it looks like we're ok. The pool company's electrician came out to talk about lighting and we're adding lights to the steps off the deck on the left side of the pool for safety which we knew we wanted at the start. We're going to add some lights to the underside of the coping around the spa and firepit too and want them to do it so it's covered under their warranty. I also don't want an electrician to have to pull up our stone decking to hide wires after the pool is finished. We had them go ahead and quote us some string lights across the L shape our roof makes, and it came back crazy high - almost $2000. We're already wired for lighting out there, so all they have to do is connect and string the lights. We'll take care of that after the construction is finished and put that saved money toward our Alaska cruise. We've determined our sales guy was pretty new when we started this whole process. There have just been a couple of things that he said that stand out now that we are in the middle of the project. For instance, he told us the kitchen would be the very last thing to be constructed. The PM has told us it will happen in 2-3 weeks when the stone guys are here doing the rest of the work which makes sense. Why pay someone to come out twice when you don't have to? However, DH is now scrambling to research and pick out his grill and fridge since he thought he had more like 4-6 weeks. There are some other things the sales guy has said that just don't make sense now that we're going through the process. In hindsight, it kind of feels like he was learning along with us. ? Good news though, the PM said things start happening fast at this point.

I was wrong, it was the gas line they laid yesterday. They came back out and worked a little on the water lines today. Next up is an inspection for the gas lines.

I've never skied...snow, water, or jet. I'm looking forward to living vicariously though your trip!

Today the plumbers showed up to dig the trenches for the lines going from the main water line at the front of the house to the equipment pad to the pool. It's all been between our house and our neighbor's so far; nothing has been dug in the backyard yet. Fortunately we can stop watering the gunite twice a day - it's been cold in the mornings. ?

I agree with @IRMO12HD; if you wear contacts, they are a great option too. Then you don't have to worry about a new mask if your Rx changes (or leaving your mask at home or on the ship). Unfortunately, I can only do contacts if the excursion is early in the cruise. I think the increased salt throughout the week does something to the shape my eyes. I just can't get them in comfortably after day 4, but when I get home it's back to normal after a few days.

I've watched a couple videos and thought those boots must protect the finish. They don't look very comfortable.

I need my glasses for distance, but my Rx is slight enough (about 1.25) that I don't even bother. There is a small magnification underwater anyway. DH on the other hand has terrible vision with an astigmatism (4.5 in one eye and 3.0 in the other). He uses a prescription mask for the magnification, but skips the astigmatism bit for the mask. I remember when we bought my gear when I was first getting scuba certified that they had Rx masks for sale in the dive shop (on land, not on a ship). However, he bought his last mask online at Divers Direct. This is the one he got, and you can can select a different Rx for each eye. $110. https://www.diversdirect.com/p/tusa-liberator-prescription-mask

Agreed. But first sailing for who? Short 3-4 days to CocoCay from Florida? I'm pretty sure my 7 day from Galveston at the end of October is going to be toast.

They did our spa, tanning ledge, and steps first, and then came up the stairs when they had finished with the rest.

@JLMoran Our builder uses gunite which is shot through the hose as a powder. There is a second hose for water. The two are mixed as they come out of the hoses, and the guy spraying them can adjust the water and therefore thickness of what is being sprayed on the walls. To be honest, I've never mixed concrete myself, so I'm not sure if it is thinner or not. This seemed to be pretty thick, kind of like mortar that was then spread out with various tools to form the inner shape. Kind of like icing a cake with buttercream. I can do all kinds of different things with icing depending on how thick it is. The outside dried relatively quickly. The crew finished at 2pm, and the project manager stopped by closely thereafter and said that we could get in it that night if we avoided the edges of the steps and benches. If we waited until today we wouldn't have to worry about them though. It's a foot thick in some places so to keep the outside from forming cracks while the inside dries, we have to wet it down twice a day. When they finished, they dug 4 little holes in the bottom back down to the dirt underneath that will just be filled with plaster at the end of the project. If we get more rain and any water accumulates under the shell, this will prevent it from floating on top of the water like a boat, the holes will let that water come into the pool instead. In about a week they'll come out to finish the plumbing and electrical, then they install the water line tile.

Almost done.

@WAAAYTOOO we had rain every day last week, and storms last night. You could still see lightning in the distance when they showed up this morning. But it's sunny now. The tarp has slipped a little, and the spa is starting to take shape.