goodbye, summer (part one)

I love love love having a pool at my disposal (read: backyard), and especially one both long enough to do my future-Olympics-swimming training* and secluded enough to swim naked when I so desire (very freeing). It's old, it's cold, the pool light fell out of its place and I fear electrocution, and the ancient bolt holding the ladder to the side busted this year, but-- it also has an old-school diving board and slide setup of the type that have since been banned by law, it's deep enough for extreme diving contests, AND it's a great place to float/photograph my Halliburton. So, it's AWESOME. It is a pain in the butt, behind, arse, whatever you want to say, though, to keep up.

Lately I've had to do a lot of algae diving (scrubbing the black algae spots off the bottom by hand, with a steel scrubber--it's harder to get proper leverage with a pole from the surface), acorn scooping (again, using myself on the end of the mesh bag instead of a pole--), and snorkel scrubbing (using the pole this time, but inside the pool and using my scuba mask and snorkel, treading water. Better exercise). While I appreciate the training this is giving me in case I ever become a Rescue Diver (treading water to move closer to the side of the pool while holding acorns above my head, and then hurling them as far as I can is much like Ashton Kutcher treading water for an hour while holding something heavy over his head and Kev Costner looks on and laughs, in The Guardian) or in case my cruise ship capsizes and I need the lung capacity to dive down and turn off the propellers to escape, I am also glad that all this work is about to end.

Because summer's over. :(

It's time to cover the pool. It's going to go from this:

To this:


Soooooo sad!!
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*For those of you wondering whether my Olympic Swimming aspirations will conflict with my Olympic Figure Skating destiny, put those worries to rest: I am a two-season girl.  Look closely...