POOL GAME, PART 1

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So last winter, I decided to re-engineer the way I covered my pool. Pool covers use these plastic water bags to weight down the sides. Well, I found that the bags had a tendency to spring leaks, so I decided I would develop a more permanent solution. I took PVC pipes, filled them with water and sealed the ends with caps. To keep them in place, I took small bags of sand and nested the pipes there. I even painted about half of the pipes, at which point I ran out of paint. And you can guess the answer to the occasional question of, “So, gonna finish painting those?”

Anywho, after I wrote about my ingenious method of weighting down the pool cover, someone told my wife that I should patent the idea. Having seen how the entire thing played out, I think it is safe to say that the Patent and Trademark Office would possibly sentence me to prison if I tried to patent this idea. My experiment marked an utter disaster, a failure of Edsel-like proportions. Sure, in the capable hands of a competent human (or even a moderately competent chimp) the idea may be able to fruitfully prosper. But it won’t happen on my watch, rest assured, so I gladly free up the idea to anyone who wants to take it and make it work.

The first problem arose when it occurred to me that the water was not staying in the pipes. I thought the whole point of the caps was to keep the water in. They apparently were not aware of this.

So I ended up with a bunch of hollow PVC tubes, which are not the beefiest of weights. A slight breeze would send them rolling onto the cover. The next problem was the sand bags. I am not sure why I thought Ziploc sandwich bags were some industrial strength storage device, but it took a short time for my pool cover to become very, very sandy.

As weight after weight began to fail, I tried to fix things just long enough to make it through the winter. One of the things people in the pool business tell you is not to use things like bricks to hold down pool covers, as they can fall in the pool, which is apparently bad. Needless to say, I used bricks to weight down the pool cover as the PVC pipes failed. Please don’t tell the pool people.

So by the end of the winter, I had a pool cover with about eight PVC pipes floating in it, and a hodgepodge collection of cinder blocks, bricks, logs and potters holding down my cover.

After a while, my wife gently suggested that I clean up the pool area, since it looked like Fred Sanford was tending my pool. I took all of the new weights out of the pool, and began the process of pumping the water off the top of the cover. It had rained a few times since I had last cleared it out, so there was a fair amount of water and leaves that needed to be taken care of. After a few hours of running the pump, I went and checked on it, only to find out that there was actually more water on the cover, and it was now about four feet down in the pool. (For those unfamiliar with pool covers, that’s about four feet farther down that it should be.)

Being the keen investigator I am, I realized that the cover had a hole somewhere in it, and the pump was essentially just drawing more water onto the cover, sinking it lower and lower and lower ... until splash – in goes the cover.

My wife was inside, and apparently heard my commentary, because she came out to see what the ruckus was about. I explained to her that the pool cover was now floating in the pool and, as a bonus, roughly 8 billion pounds of leaves had slid off into the deep end of my pool. By the time I finally dragged the cover out, you could see about an inch into the water. Again, not good. I would like to tell you that there was a happy ending, but I am afraid that will have to wait. But first, we have to get through next week’s hurdles, which I will tell you involved (a) me (b) electricity and (c) dangling upside down.