Floatation wishes and Chlorine dreams

We made it! The pool is up and lovely and it was soooooooooooooooo well worth the work. I noticed on Sunday that I hadn’t taken any photos of the entire process – and let me tell you, it was one hell of a process, but we did it fairly green (using reclaimed materials and manual labor) and we didn’t spend a dime on the process, other than to buy the pool and the pool goodies.

We have a huge back yard. None of it is even close to level, however. You’d think at least one small area would be, but nope. So we had to make a level place for the pool and decided on the location and then figured out how much work we’d have to do. Oh my goodness, lots of work. We used reclaimed timbers from our garden beds and even reused the rebar and nails to build a frame. When the frame was built, we saw that we needed to raise the level of the land within 3/4 of the frame up about 7 inches. That’s a huge amount of earth to move, tamp down, and level, but we had no choice. Using shovels and a pick ax, we dug up the western most garden – don’t be sad, we haven’t planted anything in those gardens for years. We loaded dirt into old medical crates 4 at a time and hauled the crates behind our tractor up to the site where we dumped the earth and started tamping down. We did this for 2 solid days until we had moved more than 1 full ton of earth from the bottom of our land to the top. After that was about 2 hours or so of detailed leveling, measuring, more leveling, eyeballing, etc. And then we set up the pool. It took about 4.5 hours to fill. Hell of a lot of work for a 12′ above ground pool, but it’s soooooooooooooo worth it. It’s blissful out there. Not deep, not huge, just perfect for our family.

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Bump

Life will throw you curve balls and you’ll hit bumps in the road. It seems as if I’ve been experiencing nothing but bumps since Tuesday. Finally today it’s smoothing out. Thank Elvis.

One of the bumps was the pool. We worked for 12 hours getting the land ready and it’s still not done. I’m thinking tomorrow will be the golden day. There’s probably only another hour or two of digging and moving earth, probably 20 minutes or so of tamping it down, and then the pool set up itself followed by the 3 or 4 hours to fill it. By the time we’re done, B and I are just going to grow fins and gills. Hell, he’s halfway there – he’s a Pisces.

Thursday night, some driving genius nearly ran me off the road which resulted in me choosing between 1) having a sideswiping collision with a vehicle and nearly killing myself and said genius or, 2) veering off the side of the road and colliding with the curb. Not really wanting to die before seeing Willie again (less than a month!) I chose option 2. Option 2 did not kill me but absolutely killed our budget as it resulted in 1 flat tire, 1 exploded tire (yes, I mean exploded,) and two rims bent beyond repair. I could have died anyway! It’s a freaking miracle I didn’t flip the van. And of course no place has those rims, so they had to be ordered from a salvage yard. The mechanic says it should be done by Tuesday. How awesome is that? 😡

I promised B that I would make spanikopita for dinner tonight. He’s been feeling really really ill lately and could use all the iron (spinach) he can get. Of course, I realize an hour ago that I’m completely out of garlic. I need 5 cloves. And, of course, B has the only working vehicle – at my suggestion this morning. Guess we’ll be holding off on the Greek feast. Dammit.

But it’s not all be horrible and we all have those temporary What-The-Fuck-Is-Happening moments. It’s getting better. Today is darn near lovely. I just wish that, on the Road of Life, I was equipped with better suspension.