I spuddle.

I’m sure you all remember last year when Wading Pool Season began and I tried to siphon my previous year’s wading pool using a sawed off piece of garden hose and accidentally drank a big, giant Slurpee sized gulp of SLIME AND BACTERIA and HOLY HELL I’M NOT LYING WHEN I SAY THAT I CAN STILL TASTE IT.   Well, guess what?  It’s Wading Pool Season again!  Only my kids are bigger now and they are not satisfied with any baby-like WADING POOL, they want to swim.   Oh, I lie.  They didn’t care at all, in fact they wanted to use last year’s wading pool to the extent that they actually sobbed and fought for their right to keep last year’s pool.   But I begged them. I did.  I don’t know why.   (Well, it’s dirty and I don’t know how to clean it and am too lazy to attempt it, for one thing.)  I have a million things to do, books to write, presentations to manifest out of thin air, lesson plans to conjure up, and it wouldn’t kill me to wash the kitchen floor.   But!  I said to myself, “They are bigger this year!  Only a SWIMMING POOL will do!”

So I rushed out to Canadian Tire, the store where I Do Not Shop because once the owner of one of the franchises called me the C-word, this after destroying the engine of my car.   And he also made me cry.  But that was fifteen years ago and I’m trying not to hold grudges in some kind of pseudo-Buddhist-self-calming-flaky-hippie thing I’m attempting as a way of staving off the anxiety attacks that I constantly have regardless, and besides, they have cheap inflatable pools.   I dragged my reluctant kids to this house of horrors to procure the pool and of course the store is so overcrowded and stupid that you can’t use a shopping cart so I dragged the 30 pound awkwardly shaped box by hand, forcing The Bun to carry the chemicals and The Birdy to carry the cover.   Along the way to the till — which, by the way, was approximately 80 miles from the pool section of the store — I passed no less than ten employees who all smiled pleasantly and ignored me.  The cashier, not surprisingly, was rude.   Likely I’d be rude also if I was reduced to being a cashier at a store owned by a man who bandies the C-word around, but not SO rude that I sighed dramatically and rolled my eyes when asked if I could actually emerge from behind my till to scan the barcode with my cordless scanner so that the customer did not have to lift said 30-pound awkwardly shaped box onto the five foot high counter for my convenience.   But hey, that’s why I’m not employed by the Most Miserable Store In Town!   Needless to say, I was halfway out the exit door when finally a young salesman, who had been watching my progress with two preschoolers and 50 pounds of crap from one end of the store to the other, said, “Can I help you with that?”   So I said, “Actually I think these last three feet to the car are probably the easiest!”

Then The Birdy fell off the concrete boulevard thing and skinned her nose on the pavement.

Finally I got the stupid Simple Set pool home and The Bun was itching to just DIVE IN!  And why not?  The box said it was “ready for water in ten minutes!”   What the box DIDN’T say is that it’s “ready for water in ten minutes!” if you’ve already spent a week and a half making your back yard entirely and perfectly 100% level.   It did mention that being level was preferable, but it did not say the truth which is that if your ground is even slightly off level, when you go inside to eat spaghetti and meatballs for the tenth day in a row and leave the hose running, it’s likely the entire pool will collapse sideways and cause a tidal wave of algae-treated water to slosh down your back steps and into your basement.

At this point, I wish this story had a punchline and I guess the only punchline that it has is that guess what I’m doing right now?  It’s 11 pm on Friday night and I’m… putting on waterproof shoes to go outside and stomp on the remaining half-collapsed walls of my stupid SIMPLE SET pool so that I can get the rest of the water out so that I can spend my Saturday digging up the sodden, marshy grass and levelling the ground using only my iPhone, a two-by-four and a sharpened shovel so that maybe on Sunday or SIX WEEKS FROM THURSDAY if my destroyed back is healed by then, I can spend ten minutes getting my pool “ready for water”.

Last year’s wading pool is looking better all the time.

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