Water is Wet
My parents left the country one summer for two weeks and left me alone, so I decided it was a perfect opportunity to have “some” of my “closest friends” over often. My ‘rents lived out in the middle of nowhere with the nearest neighbors 100 yards away; plus, the house had a pool and a hot tub, so it was a perfect set up.
The first night I had people over, the hot tub got nasty because we may have exceeded maximum capacity a little bit. My bright idea was to siphon all the water out of the tub directly into the pool, and refill the tub with the hose. It worked perfectly—the hot tub was clean and the pool a little warmer.
The next night, word was catching on…and the group of friends increased some in size. Again, the hot tub water was almost opaque by next morning. No problem! Just did the same trick from the previous night. The hot tub water went into the pool. And I refreshed the tub with clean hose water. The last night was just…yuck, but I knew the drill!
I just used my previously successful trick and the hot tub gunk got dumped into to pool. But then I couldn’t see the bottom of the pool. Now I had a problem. In my efforts to keep the tub clean, I had neglected the pool water, which had been slowly turning into a sickly grayish-green color! Uh oh.
I thought that the filters could take care of it by the time my parents came home at the end of the week. But I wasn’t sure how to make the pool water crystal clear for my spectacularly anal parents. That’s when the genius idea bulb went off in my head. Twenty minutes later, I had tens of thousands of gallons of water roaring out of the pool working its way down the mountain like a grand liquid chlorinated avalanche. I thought I had the perfect solution—but I had no IDEA what I was getting myself into.
I was feeling smug about my dirty water problem solution when I noticed the shape of the inside of the pool becoming less defined. There’s a vinyl skin for the interior of the pool, and the water held it down against the concrete. To my horror, the blue skin was methodically sucking itself off the walls and bottom like a yawning college student extricating his hungover body off his gunky bathroom floor.
Immediately I stopped the exodus of water with the pool only a couple feet deep in the far side. The shallow side was a “little” wrinkled, but I could salvage the deep end. I had to think of a different way to refill the pool, then I remembered my trusty water hose that I used to fill the hot tub. I was sure it could fill up the pool in five days! So, I turned on the water confident that the pool would be full of clean well water presently.
What I didn’t realize was that the house used well water. And after a few days of pumping, the water didn’t flow out so quickly anymore. Five days from the beginning of the refill, the water was just reaching the shallow end, and Mom and Dad were coming home the next day.