Ethel decided that all of our old outdoor furniture doesn't work anymore, so she's replacing all of it.

In teak .

You've heard of teak - it's an extremely expensive dense wood that costs a lot stands up well to weather and time. It costs a lot of money comes from Indonesia and is mainly used in making lots of money for fat Indonesian dudes patio furniture, boating or other outdoor applications.

Ethel got, among other things, two "Maui Loungers" from Teak Warehouse:

                                            

I'm showing you a stock photo of a Maui Lounger from Teak Warehouse's website because Ethel is too busy spending money on other teak things working overtime to pay for all of this teak to take pictures of the actual loungers on our back porch.

We've got these two loungers, a six-seat oval teak dining set, and a set of teak sofa, chairs and ottomans. The plan started out as "find two teak loungers on craig's list" but somehow it grew into "buy all new outdoor furniture from really expensive places reputable dealers".

We got all of this teak because Ethel is on a spending binge the rest of our furniture doesn't work. I wasn't able to figure out what was wrong with the furniture - I sat on the sofa and chairs and used the tables, it all seemed fine - so I'm forced to assume that the old furniture didn't cost enough money must be about to break, and only Ethel is able to ascertain the furniture's apparent fragility.

At this point, the pool construction is halted again - all of the tile has been added - so now we wait on Maricopa County to come out and do an inspection, upon the passing of that inspection, Rondo Pools will spray in the Pebble Sheen and we'll fill the thing with water. (We had to get Pebble Sheen rather than Pebble Tec because the Pebble Sheen costs more is better in some unspecified, yet obvious-to-Ethel, way).

Then the Performance Solar folks will hook up the water heater, and we should be swimming by - well, really, I don't have any idea. The Performance Solar folks did tell us how great their solar water heating system would work, but they were unspecific as to exactly how long it would take to warm up the pool to a comfortable temperature for swimming. This bothers me, since choosing Performance Solar was my main input into the pool fiasco.

And I think that they built the solar water heater out of teak.