Thou shall not swim

Few things are as relaxing on a hot summer day than to dip your toes into a refreshing swimming pool. Within seconds, you're taken to place far from ringing telephones, deadlines, responsibilities. Time in a pool stands still.

As our friend Rat says "There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing, messing about by a river, or in a river or on a river. It doesn't matter which". River, of course, is Victorian English for swimming pool. (Boat is substituted for River in the movie versions. Boat is wrong and wrongheaded)

Except of course when you can't.

Each morning, as is my habit, I take the dogs out, walk the grounds, check to see what the deer have eaten overnight, when recently I noticed how still it was. Why was the water level in the pool a foot less than when I went to bed?



A pipe had burst in here overnight.

The pump sprayed a geyser draining the pool inside the pool house. The flooded pump was destroyed. The electrical panel...destroyed, the pool sweep destroyed, the rare, no longer available heater tubes, destroyed.

While waiting for all the pipes, parts, wires, tubes and gaskets to arrive the pool turned to




Mercifully, all are finally back together. With all new pieces we should be good to go, worry free for years. In a few days the pool will clear, the temps will fall, and it will be time to close the river until next year.

That will give me time to rid the lake of its duckweed infestation.



Toad