Poolside

That's where I am.

We have 4 pools. Two of the inflatable top ring kind and two of the above ground hard side kind. You'd think our family was it's own swim club or something. But the fact is, we collect things.

It started with a small above ground. We traded it for backhoe work and thought we were getting the better end of the deal. (After all, we didn't have a pond that needed dredged.) It even came with a brand new, still in the box, liner. You couldn't beat that. But we needed to level a spot
to put it and just never got around to it. It isn't like we didn't have a backhoe or anything.

Because we thought it would be great to have a pool that we could swim in, we purchased a small inflatable. That was the year we built the house. It was a lifesaver to entertain the kids while we were sweating in the sun carrying lumber and fighting with contractors. We stored it in the basement of the new house that winter and mice found it. Turns out we had a small crack around the unfinished basement door.

Then a friend of ours had a very large above ground pool that he didn't want anymore. All we had to do was take it down and move it. Wow. Now that was a deal. It's huge, and has a deck around it. Originally, it cost more than our van did. We're talking quality here. I saved all winter for a new liner. I bought two new swim suits because I'd be hanging out poolside all summer. (I don't mean literally, the ones I bought are definite cover-alls. I didn't want to traumatize the UPS man.) We placed several phone calls only to find out that there is but one person in the tri-state area who will put up second hand pools. He verified that our pool was indeed a top of the line, class A pool. But second hand pools are quite dangerous to put up and he didn't want to touch it. Plus it cost more than I had saved.

So I took my money and bought a very large inflatable. The biggest that our one-store town had. It was sitting in the yard, still boxed, when the puppies attacked it. Chewed a hole through a corner of the box, and there were little bits of plastic all over the lawn. I was sick to my stomach. We locked it away from the puppies and let ourselves cool down for a few days before checking the damage. We were in luck! Turns out they only got the cover and the pool itself was intact. While debating where to put the thing (debates of this nature often take weeks at our place) the mice found it. They went right for the pool itself. We put the whole thing inside a giant enclosed container and let it sit over winter.

So this summer I drug it out and attempted to allow our family to swim. Again. After several days of patching holes in both the pool wall and the inflatable ring, we spread sand over the backhoe-leveled spot and started filling. Bigger is not always better. The huge pool was too big for the flat area and started walking down the hill. What could we do but drain it and start all over. (And of course it's all my fault, according to my husband.) The second attempt to fill it went much better until we realized that the front was just low enough to roll onto the plug. How on earth would we drain that thing come fall? We spent two days yelling at each other as we used a full sheet of plywood and a skid loader to roll the pool first one way, then another. It seemed to be getting rounder and have less low spots, but the more we worked the more work we created. After finding the plug and raising the entire pool an inch we decided to call it quits.

Don't even get me started on the pump and chemicals. I have no idea what I'm doing with them and randomly throw things in. It doesn't help that the baby loves throwing rocks and dirt chunks into the water to hear the plunk. The kids are now swimming in a huge murky reservoir and I refuse to do much more than lift the baby in and out.

Sitting poolside has it's benefits. My tan is really coming along.