Holy Heatwave, Batman

I think we've completely missed May and gone straight from April showers to July heatwave. It's been in the 90's all weekend (yes, I know I'm Canadian but I live on the U.S. border and still think in Fahrenheit; it's probably been just over 30 Celcius). I had scheduled the pool company to open the pool on Monday since I was tired of doing most of it myself every year (darn kids make sure they are never around on pool opening day) but it was so hot on Saturday that DS offered to open it himself. Knowing how much work was involved I was loathe to cancel the pool company, but figuring that some good hard labour would do him some good I told him to have at it.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of an almost 16yo on a mission.

First him and his buddy (whom I call second son; SS) called up a bunch of friends and invited them over for "a swim". Yes, cruel, I know. We threw the pump in the cover to start pumping out the water, usually a 36 or so hour process (it's a huge pool with tons of water on that cover). Now they wanted it open and they wanted it open now, so 36 hours wasn't going to cut it. When the naive energetic friends showed up DS was waiting for them with a stash of buckets and the bucket-brigade began. Being as I wouldn't let them dump all that water into my backyard and flood out me as well as the neighbours the buckets of water had to be carried through the garage and dumped on the driveway.

After about an hour of this (I can't believe they hadn't quit yet!) they got the bright idea of using the wheelbarrow; fill it with buckets and roll it out to the front to dump it. After a short while they came up with an even more scathingly brilliant idea; they took my large garbage pail, tied it to the fridge-moving cart, and filled that with buckets to then roll it to the front and dump it.

They had a full production line going; we definitely have a bunch of future auto-workers here. One would handle the wheelbarrow, one would handle the garbage pail, and the rest were on bucket-duty. Then they would switch up (yup, job rotation) as needed. All in all it took them about 6 hours to do what usually takes me an entire weekend.

So the pool is open, I've got six teens with a little extra cash in their pockets since I didn't have to pay the pool company, and I still got all my flowers planted. Priceless!

The pic is from last spring, but I haven't cleaned up the hoses and whatnot yet to get a decent pic from this year. The pic is taken from my wicker loveseat where I love to sit and knit in the evenings.