Not for me—for Ramón. Although he didn’t get a lot of relaxation in, having spent the morning struggling to get the pool pump motor apart and see if he could figure out why it was vibrating so hard (he’s an engineer, this is what he does—remember how we fixed the subsiding front walkway? Yeah, this is more of that).

His technical opinion: we have to disconnect the pump from the pool plumbing, dismantle it, clean it out, replace a bunch of seals and other motory things, then reconnect it. One eensy problem—when we had this motor put in about eight years ago the guy who did it rerouted some of the pool plumbing pipes directly over the motor, which means we can’t just unhook it and lift it out. It pretty much lives in a cage of PVC.

Which means our options are as follows:

1) Cut out the piping over the pump, pull the pump and fix it, then install new PVC piping. Quite apart from the fact that I’ve never done that before, I’m not sure if we could get everything fitted properly.

2) Cut a hatch in the fence behind the pool pump that would allow someone to reach in, unhook the pump, and pull it out through the fence. On the one hand, this would allow us to pull out the pump on a yearly basis to clean and fix anything that needed fixing. On the other hand, we have one of those offset slat fences and creating a hatch that would be both secure and aesthetically pleasing would be … a challenge. Yeah, let’s call it a challenge.

Ramón is already on the side of the fence hatch and I do agree that this would make future pump upkeep much easier, but he’s talking about taking out a section of the fence and the back gate to create it and … no. Just no. I think I may go out sometime next week when the weather is nice and just get it done myself. My honey is brilliant, talented, and a whiz with tech and motors, but I’m the one who earned the title Spackle Woman, Maid of Mortar early on in our marriage (my grandfather could design, build, and repair anything, and his skills seem to have been passed on genetically because EVERYONE on that side of the family can do what he did). If anyone will be handling power tools, it will be me.