Pool Opening

This little boat has been anchored in the little cove just below my house for two days now and is still here this morning. 

Sometimes when I am out on the deck and see him there I wonder and I sit there and make up little stories…ah, the places the mind wanders.

And I have been out on the deck.  The pool is officially open and running, although I still need to add about an inch of water and there is a leak in one of the solar panels so we are not able to use the solar heater right now.  I've called about the solar panels, but this is busy season and we are really on the outer fringes of his territory so I don't expect an immediate response. 

In the meantime, I still have to scrub up the ring around the water
line of the pool — I'll do that before I add the last inch of water.  
This is my living reminder of air pollution, the grime that accumulates
is an oily residue from the trains that run multiple times a day on the
tracks along the Hudson River.  I get much less of a ring now that the
pool is covered most of the time.

Once I've scrubbed the pool there is still the deck, and power washing is not enough to do the trick, although it might work if I used a cleaning agent and a brush and just power rinsed.  I think I have a scrub pad that can be fitted onto a broomstick to save the backbreaking labor.  It certainly is worth a try.  It isn't worth the money to hire someone to do the power washing, they only get the easy stuff and I still have to do the work to get the tough stuff off.  I'd rather just do it right the first time myself.

That is always the tough question with pools and decks.  Is the pleasure of having it worth the trouble (or expense) of maintaining it?  I know tons of people who are eager for this or for that but never think about what is involved with maintaining it until after they've spent the money to get it installed. All they think of is the picture-perfect magazine view of the life they think they'd like to have.  But there is a grimier side to everything in life.

I knew what the deck would entail, and the pool, and I like the control of my money and my time that comes with doing it myself. In my experience, in the long run, I come out ahead because no one cares as much about my pool and deck as I do, so I am more likely to pay attention and catch things early.  And actually I've gotten my routine down to a simple series of steps.  As for the deck, someone would have to clean it every spring.  And I continue to have my issues with hiring people to do work I don't want to do just because I "can" hire them.

But then the pool came with the house, which came with the husband and I've long since made peace with its presence.