Toys for Tots 2016

I have been involved in the annual Toys for Tots toy drive for the past few years and is something I like to do. At first, I would just buy some toys at the toy store on Black Friday or early December and donate at work. A few years ago no one volunteered to head the drive at work and there were no donation bins. I was disappointed and had to find another drop off location, barely making the deadline. After this, I decided to take a more active role and became the coordinator for two of our offices in two different counties. I combine donations with another office and we drive them all to the USMC Reserve Center in Hialeah, FL where the toys are collected and distributed to the community.

We had a good collection this year. The main coordinator is new this year so I helped him out. We got started a little late but have a good plan for next year so hopefully we can get even more toys in 2017.

Christmas Cookies

This year for Christmas I decided to make gingerbread cookies. Lots and lots of gingerbread cookies. These were to be Christmas presents for my family. I figured that I would give them my time by making something for them rather than buying something for them.


This is the first year I was making gingerbread cookies on a large scale. I've made several dozen chocolate chip cookies at a time but those are drop cookies and not decorated. These gingerbread cookies will take much longer. This year was to be the first time on a large scale. Now I'll lean from mistakes this year so that if I do it again it won't take as long because I'll know what I'm doing.


We used the Betty Crocker gingerbread cookie mix and used salted and unsalted butter, basically whatever we had in the freezer. After it was all done, we didn't notice a difference in taste between using salted and unsalted butter. The Betty Crocker mix is simple, just add butter and water. I didn't want to search for a homemade recipe because I knew that this was going to be a lot of work and was going to keep this part simple.


We made one batch at first to test out the recipe. It worked fine. I had a nice picture of me rolling out the gingerbread in my nice clothes on that test batch but that wasn't reality so it didn't get posted.


Now that one batch was made, time to make the rest, another eight bags of gingerbread cookie mix. All of the gingerbread dough was made at once and then refrigerated overnight. The next day I got to cooking. Actually rolling. I had to roll out and cook for hours. There were no pictures of this. Cookies were everywhere. Both the kitchen counter and myself were covered in flour. Well not that bad but the counter was covered and I had flour on my arms, pants, and face.


I had three trays of cookies going at a time. One baking, one cooling off, and one being loaded with cookies.

Decorating was just as hard as rolling out and baking them.

So if rolling out and baking sounded like a lot of work, the decorating took just as long. This year we have long dining room table for the first time. That is one of the reasons I did this, we finally have a place to decorate them all.

White, red, and green holiday icing.

It was fun making different faces. They start to look funny after decorating for a long time. The steady hand isn't so steady anymore. Also this is a good shot of the different sizes. We had big ones, regular size ones, small ones, and a gingerbread house for the little gingerbread man.

Here is Toby looking desperate to get a cookie. I did learn that making gingerbread cookies and leaving them out to cool and leaving them out for the icing to dry will drive the dogs crazy. They whined and whined for days while our little factory was churning out gingerbread men.

Eight full boxes of gingerbread men and one full tin (not pictured). Lots of gingerbread men for the whole family. After it was all finished, over 175 gingerbread cookies were made!

What did I learn for next year?
- Make more big gingerbread men and less medium-sized ones; big cookies are easier to decorate and have more room for detailed decorations also they aren't as tedious to roll and cut out
- Make the dough all at once and let it cool in the refrigerator
- Watch out for the little scavengers! They will find a way to steal a cookie off the table if you don't watch them.

Draining the Pool

My pool was a mess. It was a deep, dark green swamp with algae floating on top. How did it get there? A lot of factors. My filter cartridge housing cracked and was leaking so the filter wasn't working well. As we attempted to patch it, the water kept getting greener and greener. Then the Barracuda automatic vacuum broke and I needed to replace the rubber feet and flanges for it to work again. I kept dumping $100of chemicals  a month into the pool and nothing fixed it. After reading up on the internet, I ultimately realized that I needed to drain and change out the water. I am supposed to change it out every 2-3 years but I had the same water for 5 years, and that was just too long. Now I know.


Of course whenever I went to the pool supply store they just recommended more chemicals. I'm done with pool supply stores. They can test my water and I will buy liquid chlorine from them once every other month but I'm buying my supplies online now.


To drain the pool, I rented a submersible pump from Home Depot at $40 for 24 hours. I rented it the night before, set up the hose to drain into the park behind my house and tested the pump. It worked well and I decided to turn on the pump first thing in the morning and begin the drain. My pool is 13,000 gallons so it was going to take a few hours to drain. I think it ended up taking 3-4 hours. I intentionally didn't use my pool pump to drain the pool so I wouldn't burn it out if I lost suction.


How did I clean it? While draining, I kept the walls wet and the algae just washed right off. I made sure not to let the pool dry while it was draining. It was much easier to clean this way.

Look how green it is!

Look who is following me....Sparky is always curious.

Have to keep those walls wet and wash the algae off. Notice I started first thing in the morning so the sun wasn't drying the pool and I could get all the cleaning done during daylight.

 I would wash the algae off with the hose as best as I could. Then I would go eat breakfast and wash the walls again. Then I set up the equipment while the pump kept draining the pool.

That's a lot of algae but the pump is sucking it all out. Another reason why I didn't use my pool pump to drain my pool - I didn't want to flush out all this fish-smelling muck from my pool piping.

Now I am ready to get to work inside the pool and start cleaning.

To clean the pool, I bought about 10 gallons of chlorine. That was more than I needed but I just used the left over to treat the pool afterwards. I did a chlorine wash by using a 2 gallon garden watering can to sprinkle a 1:1 chlorine to water ratio over the rinsed walls. I used a pool brush to scrub the walls after I poured but this didn't do much other than spread out the chlorine wash all over the walls. After I got a section of the pool walls wet with this mix, I rinsed it off with a hose.

 

Here I'm spraying the walls of the pool after rinsing the walls with a diluted chlorine wash. Oh yeah, I ruined the color on those pants from the chlorine splashing on them. I planned for that.

 

This is the pool with about half of the walls washed. I had to finally turn off the pump because it wouldn't suck up the last bit.

For good measure, I went around the pool with a pressure washer. My pool's surface is made of gunite. Using a pressure washer will generally destroy the surfacing so I only used the pressure washer on a low setting (low PSI nozzle) and mainly used it to sweep water and debris to the pump. I also used the pressure washer to get rid of stubborn spots on the tile. Don't forget to wash under the lip of the top of the pool, this is a good spot to use a pressure washer. You don't see it from the top so algae will build up here.

Last bit of water with lots of chlorine from the final washes

Pumping out as much as I can with the submersible pump.

This was the last bit left in the pool. I used a kayak hand pump to get out the last bit of water and a dust pan to sweep up the last bit of sand and dirt from the wash.

I washed as much as I could and dumped the final buckets of water into the yard and killed the grass where I dumped it. It looked pretty clean now. Cleaning out the spa was harder. It was hard to use the pressure washer in such a small area and I couldn't see out my goggles because so much water was splashing into my face. Also sweeping up the debris from the bottom was tough because there was no room to maneuver. Ultimately I'll have to hook up the pool vacuum and dive in the water to get the last bit of debris.

Filling up the pool with the hose.

After this photo, I started scrubbing the tile from the spa. I will no longer leave the floating chlorine tab dispenser in the spa. That is what left that white staining.

Here it is nice and clean getting filled up. I did take out the hose after this and filled up the spa first.

Here we go the next day. It took about a day and a half to fill up the pool. I estimated that this cost an additional $150 on my water bill. Look how clean it is now. $1000 in chemicals would not have done that.

These are the tools I had to buy/rent special for this project. I bought a gardening water can for about $5, rubber steel-toed boots for $40, rented the pump from Home Depot for $40, and bought a pressure washer for $300. I plan on using the pressure washer and boots for many other projects.

A week prior, I also replaced the cracked filter cartridge housing. That cost me $400 and came with a brand new filter. Now the water will not have to be cleaned in a dirty filter.


I did buy some extra tools for this project. Ultimately I didn't need the pressure washer but used it anyway. We have been wanting one for a while now. I figure that if I had to pay a professional to drain my pool, I would have spent the money it cost for the pressure washer to pay for a professional cleaning.


This blog post is about a month late. I drained the pool in late November so it was still in the 80s here in south Florida. I just got busy and things at work really picked up so I missed posting this for November.