Rant #3,124: C'mon and Swim!

A new year, a new solution to a problem …

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

If you remember last year, my family and I suffered through a pool-less summer, where we poured lots of money into a seemingly bottomless pit of a pool and came up with nothing.

The pool was never swimmable—we were told that lots of people had this problem, which was due to the mild winter—and that there wasn’t much that we could do about it other than what we were doing.

We swam in the pool a total of two times, and the pool sat there as a visible reminder that the more money we put into it, the less satisfaction we were getting.

We basically just wrote off the experience, and vowed that this year, it would be better.

And yesterday, my wife and I took the first steps to try to bring that vow to some type of reality.

We purchased a complete salt-water system, including a filter made for that type of water, some chemicals, a pool cover, and, of course, plenty of salt.

Some of it we paid for with cash, the other part we had to pay with a card.

So be it; we will pay it off each month and get rid of that bill while we are presumably cooling ourselves off in the pool.

It is something we felt we had to do, the last, best chance that we feel we had to make this summer a “pool summer” for us.

I know, there are more important things happening in the world around us, like bank failures, but we can’t control those things; hopefully, we can control our pool failure by going the way of salt.

The upkeep on a salt water pool versus a chlorine pool is supposedly much less, and there are less things to do to keep it going than there is with a chlorine pool.

So rather than go through the headaches we had last year—I must have poured nearly a ton of shock and other chemicals into the pool last year to try and make it swimmable—this was an easier way out.

And my wife and I agreed—if this doesn’t work, if the pool still gives us headaches and is unusable, then it is time to kick the bucket and close it down for good.

We will have our pool man come and hook the thing up for us—he should be here in early June—and then we will hopefully be able to use this thing, which really saved us during the height of the pandemic when my wife had one week on, one week off work and myself and our son were completely out of work.

It gave us something to do, something to look forward to, and it kept us solvent during a period where we could have drowned in our own problems.

So many people wanted backyard pools then for the very same reasons that it worked for us, but we had ours already … so it absolutely worked for us big time during that horrible period.

And hopefully, it will work again.

I can’t wait to swim in the pool, listen to music outside, have a couple of barbecues … the summer is shaping up well for us …

But again it is all contingent on the pool … we have to get that in working order for everything to be A-OK.

So we have about another month until this thing gets hooked up and is ready to go, and I am looking forward to the day that we can get into that pool again.

But circumstances are so different from 2020.

My wife retired but took a part-time job for a few days a week, I have my freelance job, and my son is working, so our time in the pool won’t be as much during the week, at least, compared with what it was way back when.

But even to enjoy the pool for a few hours a week is better than looking at a dead pool that has become an eyesore in our backyard.

So onward and upward, let’s keep our fingers crossed—

Everyone into the pool!