Lemons and lemonade

So we had fun today.

I got up this morning at about 9, quite a bit later than intended, wandered through to my office, gazed lazily out the window, wondered why the pool appeared to have a cover on it when we don’t have a cover, looked a little harder and OMG WHERE HAS ALL THE WATER GONE SOMEONE’S DRAINED THE POOL THIS IS A DISASTER!!!!1!

Now imagine my horror. My first thought, not being a very practical girl, was that one of the cracks in the pool (we think there is at least one) had somehow turned nasty in the night, and all the water had seeped away… to where? Under the pool? The neighbour’s back garden? Oh the horror.

So I woke Paul abruptly, and gave him the bad tidings. I think he thought I was exaggerating (as did my Twitter friends, it seems) when I said that the pool was EMPTY, but no, it really was. Empty as my coffee cup. Empty as Bafana Bafana’s trophy cabinet. Empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Empty as Bernie Madoff’s promises. Yes, empty. Got it? Right.

Anyhow, then it struck him that he’d inadvertently left the pump on backwash overnight. Our panic eased to a resigned sort of dismay. And then our dismay slowly turned to amusement. And then our amusement turned to OH WELL IT’S HAPPENED NOW WE MIGHT AS WELL MAKE THE MOST OF IT LOL.

So we proceeded to have a luvverly afternoon of:

• Coaxing the cats into the empty pool through various devious means. Although coaxing might not be quite the right word here. Anyhow. It was fun. They still don’t like the pool, and can’t seem to understand why it wasn’t wetting them today – I think they believe it was just waiting for the right moment to turn on them.
• Tanning in the pool. And I won’t tell you what I was wearing because then this story will just get lewd.
• Advanced high-school mathematics. We lay in the empty pool working out various ways to calculate its capacity, depending on a range of variables. More fun than you think. Hey, I’ve never claimed to be a geek. But a nerd? For sure.
• Showering under the inlet-pipe-thingy. Paul dared me to stand under it, and while I was waiting for him to tell me what I’d get out of that deal, he started moving towards it – I suddenly realised that not losing a dare was prize enough, so I rushed into the water and pushed him out of the way so I could stand under it first. Exhilarating. No, seriously.
• Taking silly photos like this one:

Marooned.

The pool is now half-full and we’ll be swimming tomorrow again. Yay!

The lesson here, children, is that no matter how bleak things look, and no matter how enormous your water bill is going to be at the end of the month, and no matter how guilty you feel at having wasted all that water during the arid Cape summer, there’s still fun to be had.

Oh yes, that, and don’t leave your pool pump on backwash overnight.