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Update:

There's a hole in the (bucket?) fence! Dear 'Liza, dear liza! Eureka! I've found it! Ok, so it took a lot more looking than I thought to locate the culprit (hole). Naturally, said hole is behind a bush, and not easily noticed. Betsy apparently squeezed through the bush, dug only a little bit, and pushed out the chain link. Solution: One big (for Betsy) rock outside fence, one big rock inside fence, voila! Maybe things can get back to normal! (more or less)

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Original post:

Ok, so vacations' over, Company has left, and Betsy and I are once again settling into our regular routine, with a couple additional hassles. Betsy escaped again, so I had to make another trip to the pound to bail her out. And, I've been doing battle with my swamp cooler every weekend. (You know, the thing the plumbers were supposed to fix...)

For those of you unfamiliar with Out West, most private homes are cooled with evaporative (swamp) coolers. These are box-type devices that perch on the roof of your house, a pump pumps water to the top of the box, where it trickles over pads, and then a fan blows air from outside, through the wet pads and into your house. Thus, cooling your house (in theory). Well, the plumbers did replace the pump, the float, and some tubing (that takes water to the cooler), and fixed the fan. However, they failed to affix the float tightly enough, so it did not, in fact, float. Rather it filled with water and sank. (The purpose of the float is that when the bottom of the cooler has enough water in it, the float reaches a certain height. This float is attached to a shut-off valve for the water. If the float does not float, the water does not turn off, and thus spills all over my roof.) So after solving that problem last weekend, I then had to determine why the cooler was not cooling as well as it had previously, but was cooling a little. Answer, the pads were not becoming saturated with water because they were in the wrong place. (I had gotten a size too small, and they were at the bottom, rather than the top and so were not catching all the water that was meant to be running over them.) Strangely, the plumbers did not apparently notice this. So, I fixed the pads. Then this weekend, I noticed the thing was not cooling at all. I go to investigate and discover that the hose that's supposed to be taking the water from the pump to the top of the cooler had fallen off its fixture. Don't ask me how this happened. I just hope this won't be a regular occurrence. I'm getting kind of tired of climbing onto my roof all the time!

In addition, Betsy somehow escaped this week, and I had to go bail her out again. I have scrutinized the fence for the past 2 days, and still have no idea how this could have happened. (Adagio's family and I have plugged up all the holes under the fence because they're trying to landscape their back yard.) There are no new holes under the fences, and the shortest fence is about 4 feet. And she doesn't even jump the baby gate in my house, and that's only about 3 feet. The only thing I can think of is that someone must have let her out and then closed the gate behind. There were kids playing near the gate at that point. The last couple times she escaped were because she went next door and the neighbors had left their gate open.

In other news, I am patiently (or not so patiently) awaiting my socks-of-the-every-other-month-club yarn. My throw has not been progressing, due to my swamp cooler problem, and I had to start my lacy scarf over. It's going much faster this time around, though.

Well, that's about the news. Work is, well, work.