October 4, 2007

At long last, the pool is closed for the winter. At some point I'll check to make sure the gentlemen closing the pool actually, oh, I don't know, shut off the pump and did various other winterizery things that I paid (well, will pay) them to do.

September 30, 2007

Last but not least - the only chipmunk of the year! Chippy here was floating atop a pile of leaves in the northern skimmer. You win some (see the 23rd, below), and you lose some.

September 26, 2007

It looks like we'll be closing the pool on October 4th.

September 23, 2007

There are no pictures for this, but I rescued a little chipmunk that was clinging to the side of the pool for dear life. While I was skimming him out, he tried to run up the pole towards me. Who could blame him? I scooped him out again when he fell and then gently deposited him under a bush, where he peeked out at me in fear. Now, he'd better stay out of my house or I will be steamed.

September 15, 2007

A banner day for my web page, not so great for the denizens thereof, pictured above. I found the top three critters in the northern basket. I almost missed one of the frogs because of all of the leaves, but I spotted him in time to get his picture and give him a scenic flight into the woods. His corpse, that is.

The bottom left mouse was in the southern skimmer, and the bottom right was just floating free in the pool proper. I threw them both into the woods proper.

September 7, 2007

This isn't strictly a "kill", but what the heck is this bug? It looks like some sort of grasshopper crossed with a worm crossed with human flesh, with maybe a little scorpion thrown in there for good measure. I guess I should have kept it, but no - I pitched it into the woods like I always do. I found this... thing... in the SOUTHERN skimmer, which may well be the first thing I've gotten in it all summer.

August 19, 2007

Yet again, I find a mouse in the northern skimmer, and nothing to speak of in the southern skimmer. The new pump seems weaker than our old one for some reason. With the old pump (when it was working), it was very difficult to cut off water flow at a jet with your thumb. Now, it's a piece of cake. Sigh. Anyway, I put another two inches of water in the pool tonight because it was getting kind of low.

August 12, 2007

Another week, another few dead critters. We got the standard couple of frogs and a mouse in the northern skimmer. There was also this weird looking green bug, pictured to the left above. At first I thought it was a grasshopper, but the wings don't look right to me. Then again, how often do I really see grasshopper wings?

August 4, 2007

We actually got in the pool today! We found this one dead frog while we were vacuuming the pool. We saved about four or five live ones. The water was a balmy 87 degrees - very nice.

August 3, 2007

A bad day for frogs. Nine frogs dead. I scooped out several live ones as well. Check out the cicada in the leftmost picture - it is as big as the frog. Ick.

July 29, 2007

I spotted this little mouse in the north end of the pool when I went out to grill some burgers in the rain. I have to admit I didn't do a full check of the baskets and all, but this one was so obvious I thought I'd get rid of him right away. Lately I've been dispensing with the full catapult action and instead just using the net head directly to fling the corpses towards the woods. Some of them might even make it there. I follow my nose in this respect. Out of stench, out of mind.

I have also raised the quality of the saved images on this year's page. I've been creating low and high quality images for a few years, but only posting the low quality ones to save bandwidth and conserve disk space. Neither of those seems to be an issue any more, so I've bumped up the image quality significantly. For comparison, see the today's image in the old low quality by clicking here. Note the poor appearance of the pool floor background, the small insect to the right of the mouse, and the mouse's tail. The high quality image is four times larger. Of course, the original image is much much larger than that.

July 22, 2007

It was another fateful week for frogs. We had a lot of rain and that always presages a big kill count. I still haven't been in the pool yet, but it actually looks fairly inviting this year. The animals certainly seem to be enjoying it.

July 14, 2007

Here come the frogs. Two fairly small guys were swirling in eddies near the incorrectly pointed jets (you just can't hire good help these days - all of the jets were installed facing downwards during the pool opening, even though we pointed it out to the owner of the pool company. One jet was even in backwards! Now THAT takes talent. I fixed them all myself today. Took about two minutes.) The final frog was in the northern skimmer.

July 7, 2007

It certainly didn't take long for the mice to find the pool this year. I found this furry little guy Saturday morning as Allison and I were getting a quick rundown on the workings of the new heater, pump, and filter from the installer.

The heater seems to work pretty well. It is correctly hooked up to the pump's switch now so it is impossible for the heater to be on if the pump is off, which is A Good Thing. I need to replace the pool light switch - the X-10 version I put out there several years ago is dicey at best. I saw the pool light on sometime this week, so I know it works, but I can't figure out how to turn on the X-10 switch reliably. So out it must come. It is going to take a little while to get back into the rhythm of pool maintenance again.

July 3, 2007

As far as I can tell, the pool is now open. It has been drained, acid washed, and refilled, and all of the supporting hardware (pump, filter, heater) have been replaced. It doesn't look quite done to me yet - I believe they were supposed to vacuum the pool as well, and the flow to the return jets seems oddly weak. The new heater seems to be much easier to use than the old one. Time will tell if we got our money's worth or not - the pessimist in me thinks not. And of course, the pessimist in me is all of me.

May 14, 2007

Oh my goodness, isn't Jim a lazy boy this year! Well, it's mid-May and I finally got around to setting up the page for 2007. The pool hasn't been scheduled for opening yet - there's no rush like last year to avoid trampling plantings. The pump is dead, and I don't even want to think about what it is going to cost to fix it. Oh well, so ist das Leben.