BLONDE MOMENT

So yesterday Wes gets a call at work from our next door neighbor who has lived there for probably 3 years and we have never formally met, telling us she was nominating us for "neighbor of the year"...just kidding. We would NEVER qualify for any such award but she did call. She was informing us that her yard was being flooded and she thought we had a busted pipe from the freeze.

So Wes zips it home to check on things and calls me as he's standing in the back yard. Of course as soon as I heard flooded yard I knew exactly what happened. I didn't need to hear the rest of the story that ended with "I'm looking at our pool and it has about 2 feet of water in it".

Once again, I screwed things up and don't know how. The previous day, I was cleaning out the big filter and I should preface my defense by saying I really don't know anything about maintaing our pool. It has seemed fairly easy so far...I just throw a bag of salt in the pool once a week and it seems to be going well. It's one of those where it is so easy that I think I'm totally screwing it up. I know there are some other things I should be aware of like stabilizer, DE, shock and when those terms are mentioned, my eyes glaze over. So, I was following my hand written instructions of cleaning out the DE filter, which I have done one other time and somehow I don't think things got set back to normal operation. When you clean out this filter, it pumps water underground and comes out of a pipe at the side of our property and now we know will run down the natural slope into our neighbors yard when not cut off properly. I noticed after I finished that the water was still running out of the pipe. I made a mental note to check it in a few minutes...and I did! You thought I was going to say I forgot to check it didn't you? I did check it, but it was from a distance and I guess my eyes are failing because apparantly the water continued to pump. And I now know it pumps the water straight from the pool.

So my neighbor got a really good unsolicited watering and we got an empty pool. I called our "pool guy" and asked him to come fix what I have obviously screwed up.