O the tangy smell of algae on a cool December morning

[cjsmith]

I forgot to make an entry about the pool. Yesterday we had our pool emptied. Its ecosystem was thriving, and the best treatment was to scrub it out.

Last night I came home and looked at it. Pools look decidedly weird when they're empty. The expected visual effects from the water are all missing. Walking beside the pool, I was hyperaware of the fact that if I fell in I'd be very unhappy. Somehow, a full pool doesn't seem like a giant pit in the ground, but an empty one, well, there's no disguising that a giant pit in the ground is exactly what it is. Odd visuals, odd feeling.

Both of those were nothing compared to the SMELL. We have an entire seafood market in our backyard, I swear. A disreputable, stinky seafood market.

This morning I tried to take a picture. I pushed the shutter release, and the shutter opened...

...and that's it. My camera's shutter is still open. I had a doctor's appointment to get to, so I tossed the poor thing in a drawer and left.

Fortunately Rob took a picture. The normal color of the pool's inner surface can be seen just below the brown row of tiles beneath the diving board. That green all over everything else is algae, the source of the smell. The pool will be pressure-washed before it is refilled.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yes. I don't know how easy it would be to get rid of the pool and keep the attached hot tub at one end of it; fortunately, we never use that one (it's incredibly expensive to heat) and we have a "portable" above-ground hot tub on the deck.

That one would have to be moved and the deck dismantled in order to provide heavy equipment any access to the pool -- ah, the price keeps going up -- but it could be done. Heck, it *needs* to be done. The deck is old and won't last much longer.

[abenn.livejournal.com]

Ah. A separate hot tub makes more sense. I think that pools are a nuisance, but hot tubs are nice.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both counts! :-)

We didn't want the pool, but when we were house-hunting, everything else about this place was perfect. Little did we know how much money per year a pool we didn't want would cost to maintain -- and how incredibly expensive it would be to get rid of it! Rob is swearing that next year this pool will go.