October 7, 2002

And another pool season draws to a close. Due to some bad luck, I wasn't able to capture good images of the pools guys closing the pool - I blame the unfortunate positioning of various computer components near the wireless receiver this weekend. I guess I need to look at more effective imaging techniques.

October 6, 2002

The pool season is wrapping up. The pool guys are (in theory) coming tomorrow to winterize the pool. As usual, I will speed up the webcam to watch them overcharge me and then do nothing about it.

In any case, the season ends with a bang! As Allison and I were about to start draining the pool, something on the largish side caught my eye. There, in the shallow end of the pool, across from the steps, was the biggest dead thing I have ever seen in the pool. An opossum was drifting slowly, half up out of the water. It must have been dead for a while, because it was all puffy.

Anyway, you can imagine my excitement. Go ahead, imagine it. I ran inside to get the traditional quarter for scale, and snapped a bunch of pictures. Consequently, the other pictures I took of the mice and chipmunk in the skimmers (ho hum) are not quite up to snuff. To the squeamish: be glad that I avoided the use of macro on my camera. Also be glad that I reduce the size of the images significantly when I put them up on the web.

September 17, 2002

No pool deaths recently, although we added a bunch of water to the pool this weekend, so there is still hope. I have also set the date for the pool closing this year to be October 7. I can't believe how apathetic I've been towards the pool this year - I blame the new central air conditioning.

September 1, 2002

Well, it's finally starting to cool off around here. I got around to checking the skimmers this morning, and I found two little frogs, one still hopping, one (pictured left) not so much. In fact, it's fair to say that this guy's hopping days are over. But his fame lingers on in this little corner of the web.

August 27, 2002

It's been a long time since I've found anything dead in the pool. Not that I check all that often - but I did check today, and all I came up with was a bunch of leaves and caterpillars. So, to demonstrate that the depths to which the pool has sunk, I present this watery picture of the pool robot, sadly coated with algae. It will serve as a testament to just how lazy central air conditioning has made me. Maybe I'll get around to putting algaecide in this week, maybe I won't.

August 11, 2002

Once again we answer the ageless question: "If I were covered with fur and expired in a pool skimmer in ninety degree weather, what would I look like after a week or so?" See the results to the right.

On the left, we find a frog dead but still intact, which is a welcome change from last week's half-a-frog incident. Several live frogs were scooped out of the pool before, during, and after the above photos were taken. Obviously, there is either not enough chlorine in the pool, or there is now too much chlorine in the pool, depending on your species.

August 4, 2002

It's that time of year again - time for the frogs to come out of the woodwork and into my pool. You'll forgive me if I didn't poke around in the skimmers too much - the temperature was in the 90's and those frogs weren't smelling particularly good. I'm sure that there were more frogs in the northern skimmer than I counted, but the half-a-frog was grossing even me out. So, I scored one frog on the left, and six frogs on the right. I'll try to get to the skimmers a little more often this week.

July 21, 2002

Q: How do you know it's been too long since you've checked the pool skimmers?
A: See the fourth picture above - it's a chipmunk.

Yeah, I've been a little remiss in my pool tending duties. So sue me! Anyway, today was a fine day to dredge the corpses above out of the depths or out of the baskets, as the case may be, and hurl them boldly into the woods. The chipmunk was particularly gross, and he didn't smell too good, either.

July 4, 2002

I celebrated Independence Day by finally finding some dead animals in the northern skimmer. They might have fallen in any time in the last week, as I was on vacation in not-so-sunny Florida. Anyway, in addition to the first frog of the year, there were a couple of mice. I gave them all a nice resting place on the far side of my still too sparse lawn.

June 19, 2002

Now you know that I am all for animals living and all, but come on - eighteen days without a fatality? I blame the rain - the constant, driving rain that has raised the pool right up to the rim, thereby letting all of the little critters crawl out when they fall in. So I issue a plea to all of the furry denizens of my yard: If you feel like you might die just of natural causes, please, please jump into my pool and do it there. I thank you, and my loyal readers/viewers thank you.

June 1, 2002

A new month, a new creature in the skimmer. This little chipmunk was buried in the debris in the northern skimmer (that'd be the one to the left in the PoolCam image.) At this time of year the skimmers regularly fill with those seed thingies that look like little pipe cleaners - I don't know what kind of tree they are from. They form dense soggy mats in the buckets, and I'm sure that doesn't help the water flow at all. So I had to kind of pick around to get Mr. Chippy presentable for his photo. I made good use of my camera's macro feature for this shot.

May 29, 2002

It's been a little crazy around here. But the lawn is finally done, the sprinklers are in, the AC is cranked up, and I am ready, willing, and able to post a few more pool fatalities. First I should mention that we spotted a little snake in the pool for the first time ever, but unfortunately, it was still alive, so I didn't take a picture of it. I did scoop it out and free it. In retrospect I should have taken a snapshot, but I was too lazy to drag the camera out.

I spotted today's first victim from a distance while the sprinkler guys were still mucking about on the lawn. He was the kind of chipmunk that just barely sinks, so that he looked as if he were frozen in mid-jump from the bottom of the pool. Or maybe it was a she - check the picture and let your own opinion render mine impotent.

The second critter didn't show up until I emptied the pool robot filter bag. The mouse ended up on top of the heap, otherwise I would never have found him. But lucky for him, he gets his fifteen milliseconds of fame, albeit posthumously.

On a related note, there was a little bit of controversy surrounding my count of the dead mice from this winter. My stance on this is: I calls 'em as I sees 'em. In other years, I was not present at the pool opening, so I didn't get to take a good count. But this year I had many non-disintegrating corpses to both photograph and to fling into the woods with careless abandon - these, then, do count.

May 19, 2002

I specifically told the pool guys not to clean up the pool when they opened it this year, and that decision paid off in spades. Nine, count 'em, nine dead critters (which, for the sake of argument, we will consider to be mice) fairly littered the floor of the pool. They were all kind of jellied from being immersed for so long, but they were surprisingly solid when they were bouncing off of trees in the woods. These pictures are a little extra gross, but that's just what the doctor ordered after 200 or so days of not-particularly-grossness.

One of the mice turned up in the skimmer bucket that immediately precedes the filter. I debated about including him in the count, since he wasn't strictly in the pool, but since I may have missed some other mice in the leaves, I decided to include him and his picture.

As an extra bonus, here is a time lapse movie of the pool guys opening the pool. I set the camera to take a picture every five seconds, so the motion is a lot smoother than last year's movie. Also, the movie is a bit larger - 3,780KB.

May 17, 2002

The pool was opened today - only one day behind schedule. Let the counting begin!

May 15, 2002

The mother duck has flown the coop. One of the neighborhood cats spooked her and disturbed her nest, so she's gone. I'm changing the webcam back to view the pool, and upping the capture rate so that I get a good animation of the pool guys opening the pool tomorrow.

May 4, 2002

The Poolcam has temporarily been retargeted at the duck nest under the holly bush in the front yard. Maybe it will be a little more interesting than looking at a soggy pool cover for a while.

April 24, 2002

I've scheduled the pool opening for May 16. Oooh, can you feel the excitement?! I've corrected the estimate of the remaining time above. Hey, maybe I'll even call to get the heater gas tank refilled.

April 10, 2002

Here's something you don't see every day. This duck was hanging out in the yard. Here you can see it peeking out from under one of the holly bushes near the front door. Also, please enjoy the picture of the world's worst lawn.

March 11, 2002

Well, it's way too early for the pool to be open, despite the generally warm warm weather this winter. To tide you over, please enjoy this picture of a mouse that died in the cellar some time last week. He had dried up nicely - I guess the dehumidifier is working pretty well.

I scooped him up with a snow shovel and tossed him into the woods, where he will be a lovely "mouse jerky" treat for some lucky crow. Of course, he doesn't count towards this year's pool fatality totals.