Words for Wednesday - The little pool that couldn't

Words for Wednesday - The little pool that couldn't

I'm linking up with Delores over at Mumblings again with Words for Wednesday, this week I have chosen to weave the prompts into a true situation Cindy and I had this past week.

Here are this weeks prompts:

dominant, carpet, magazine, duster, finicky, display
and/or
carbine, boots, tactical, determination, filthy and disgusting
or you can use the phrase
MANIACAL MEGALOMANIAC

I used them all.

The little pool that couldn't

Melissa and Cindy in the pool on Cindy's Birthday

You all remember the mini pool that our daughter gave Cindy for her Birthday, I told you all about it in Happy Birthday Cindy we had a few days lounging in the pool with Melissa, and then she left us on our own, it was up to us to figure out how to use an 8 foot round pool without getting into trouble.

Actually it was really relaxing, I've never been able to wear my straw hat in the pool before, but Cindy said "It is my pool and if I say you can wear your straw hat, then you can wear your straw hat" so I wore my straw hat and I have pictures to prove it, not like magazine pictures but pictures none the less.

Jimmy floating with his straw hat on

The only mistake I made was to follow our daughter Melissa's instructions completely, she told me before she left "Now when you get into the pool, remember to spray Mom down with this sunscreen" she told me this as she was pointing to the can that she was holding straight armed so that the can of sunscreen and her pointing finger was all that I could see. "We don't want Mom to burn so remember this."

I remembered. Even this morning as I am pulling the skin that is peeling from my itching and red belly, you know that disgusting snakeskin looking stuff that sheds from your body after a sunburn. I had remembered to spray Cindy so I think I did my job, I just didn't think about Jimmy and neither did Cindy until it was too late. I can say she seemed to enjoy spraying the cold sunscreen onto my red belly the day after the burn.

Anyways we have really enjoyed floating around on the little "S" shaped noodle, just floating around and talking about things we want to do in the future. travel, spend time with the grandson, float in a bigger pool maybe, you know dreaming big.

No pump, cover, or net came with the pool. So I came up with a net, one you are supposed to use in a fish aquarium but it works really well, maybe not really well but kind of like using a duster to clean your entire house, you can get the job done it just takes longer, I was able to scoop out all of the bugs and funky stuff that seems to find its way into your pool, my mini net worked for mini poolio.

Cleaning the pool with the little net

After a few days of me scooping the bugs and gunk out, before Cindy and I floated in the mini pool dreaming about our future, with no pump or filter, the water started to get cloudy, Cindy suggested that I fix it, so fix it I did.

Rather than just drain the pool, and run water down the driveway and across the road, I grabbed tubes from the shop vac, left over pvc from some project that I had worked on, some random hose that showed up from somewhere, a piece of pipe and some electrical tape, and now I was watering the flower beds with water that would have otherwise been wasted.

I adjusted my impressive Southern engineering skills from one flower bed to another, then when it was filled I moved it back because this was all the supplies I had, it was quite a display I now had a flooded flower bed and water was running down the driveway and across the road. Oh well at least I watered the flowers.

With the pool emptied and hosed out now I had water filling the mini pool back up, it was filled way before dark and by noon tomorrow the sun would have it warmed enough so Cindy could be comfortably floating on the "S" shaped noodle in clean water.

Cindy and Dixie in the pool

At 9 pm every night I take our little dog, my trusty sidekick Dixie out for her evening "walk" before we go to bed, and this night was no different, while Dixie was "walking" my finely tuned ears that hears nothing but what I want to hear "according to my wife," heard something. I always hear water running, I picked this up while working at the water company, I was always the best at leak detections while I was working.

Anyways while little Dixie was walking I could hear water running, I'm on my hands and knees crawling around the pool trying to zero in on the sound, and just about the time Cindy was ready to throw her hands up and go to bed without me there it is, on the dark side of the pool where you can't see it at night, right there in the dark is a stream of freshly clean water shooting from the side of the pool, kind of like someone had taken an ice pick to it, or even less likely, a sniper with his trusty carbine lying on the hill behind us with a simple mission to "take out" the little mini pool.

Have you ever laid on your side in the night while water is spraying out of the side of a swimming pool and tried to fix it with "Gorilla Tape?", it's a filthy job and I wouldn't recommend it, because no matter how hard you try to stay out of the mud, it still ends up on your boots.

I began by placing one strip of Gorilla Tape (aka duct tape on steroids) over the hole and the water slows down, but from the flashlight Cindy was holding I could see it wasn't staying, so I added another to hold the tape that was coming loose and another to hold that one, and one more for good measure, the water had finally stopped, it was a success.

By morning I had, mud tracked on Cindy's carpet, a wad of tape on the ground, an empty pool, and fresh water running down the driveway and across the road.

Dixie giving me a second opinion on the damaged pool

I have the sad duty to tell you that the mini pool was a goner, no ice pick attack, assassin, or even a coyote, our little pool that couldn't was suffering from an unexpected coming unseamed at the seams incident, too bad this couldn't have happened while the water was still dirty.

Melissa came to the rescue, and with tactical determination she contacted the people she bought the pool from. When Melissa gets serious, things get done.

Melissa is not a finicky person by no means, she is more like her Mom and when something needs taken care of or replaced she is usually the dominant side of the conversation, not a Maniacal Megalomaniac type domination but she gets the job done, and she definitely came up with a better solution than for me to patch the pool.

 The solution was that as long as I would be able to get the pool back into the original box, which was about....way too small for that pool to fit inside anyways, that they would take it back and send out another one, so with determination both Cindy and I tackled the task by twisting, turning, and rolling around on the driveway, we got it back into the box, and shipped off on the big brown truck.

A bigger mini pool has arrived. Cindy and I ordered a filter pump system, a pool cover, a heavy duty tarp for a ground cover, and a net larger that one used for an aquarium to go along with the upgrade, we now have more invested in the free mini pool than Melissa's investment.

The new pool up and ready to go

Now Cindy has clean water to float in, and a pump that if I do some southern engineering to the return water spout just may turn it into a fountain.