March in the Valley of the Sun is chock-full of frenzied activity. With “Arizona winter” for all intents over, and the first nineties of the year only hinting at the bigger heat to come, there is much to do. The literally hundreds upon hundreds of A/C companies are in the midst of their busiest stretch of the year, selling and installing new systems, and running maintenance checks. For swimming pool owners, it’s the most common month of the year to do drainings, acid washes and refills. Landscapers are busy planting trees and new bushes – it’s the perfect time of the year for new plantings to get established before the heat comes on.

And that’s sorta what this whole week has been like. Monday we welcomed into our backyard a brand new queen palm that would balance off the existing one on that middle area I was calling “the strand”. On Tuesday Daniel from Hawkeye Landscaping show up with a crew to spread 1 1/4 tons of light rock on top of the old, darker stuff; there was so much rock they were able to make it look more like a tropic island than a strand. Today was a busy day: a morning visit by pool bodhisattva Alan to start draining the pool and collecting our vacuum for refurbishing, and in the afternoon the first of what will be many visits to the dentist by my sister-in-law; we’re finally getting around to get her long-neglected teeth issues taken care of. All I can say is, poor Tam, I’m glad it’s not me!

Tomorrow (Thursday), it’s back to pool care with the bead blaster guy coming to remove the calcium ring from around our pebble-tec pool surface, then in the afternoon our A/C guy is coming to do their spring maintenance call. On Friday, P.B. Alan reenters the dharma of pool maintenance to start refilling the pool and checking the filter’s O-rings to see why we’re getting a small flow of dirty water back in the pool whenever I do a backwash. By that time the pool vacuum will be fixed and we’ll be back in business.

This weekend the weather looks to be both calm and warm, so I’m planning on repainting our brown wicker furniture and green patio set white. I’ve never attempted this kind of thing before, but I’ve been doing my research and believe I’m up for it, so it promises to be both a learning and (hopefully) rewarding experience.

Once all of this is done, I’ll only have a few precious weeks before the heat returns to stay to wash down and re-stain the tiki bar and the tiki bar deck, then spray with preservative all our decorative signs, silk flowers, and anything else that needs to be protected from fading.

So much to do, so much left to be done! I still need to get back to the more inside work of consolidating our living trust documents and getting them to the lawyer for review, and Tracey needs to finish our taxes. Our reward for getting that stuff done? Getting our firearms safety training certifications out of the way so we can buy the guns we’ve been looking at and start target practice at the range just up the road.

After such a dreadful last year it’s fun to simply be doing stuff that doesn’t require a whole lot of emotional investment.