"opening the pool" ~ buretachi-style

[Or, "how NOT to open a pool."  And for the purpose of this essay, we will define pool as a 4-ft above-ground metal-frame, soft-liner container for swimming]

First, when you fill the pool at the beginning of the previous season (it wasn't until our second "season" that I caught on to the "season" lingo.  As you will see, there were a few other things that we didn't catch on to at first ...), neglect to observe the placement of the drain plug, and that it is positioned so low on the wall as to be, in fact, on the bottom of the pool.

Second, since, with 5,000 gallons of water on top of the plug, you'll be unable to drain the pool in the ordinary fashion (which, I guess, would be to simply open the drain plug and let 'er rip), procrastinate emptying via bucket brigade or siphon until the "season" is so far gone that you've forgotten the pool is still filled.

Third, having neglected to empty the pool (or "close" it, as the chlorine veterans would say) in either a conventional or unconventional manner, now also neglect to cover it.

Fourth, continue to forget about the pool throughout one of the longest, coldest winters anyone under 20 can remember.  Also, don't observe that while the ice storm brought down some large limbs, it did not overlook the dozens of small twigs available for pruning on the silver maple that partially overhangs the swimming pool.  And leaves, did I mention leaves?

Fifth:  as the weather begins, finally, to warm up in the spring, remember your pool.  Recall the drain plug dilemma.  Recollect the absence of any action to solve said dilemma.  Begin to worry.

Sixth ... take a deep breath, gather buckets and rally the troops with memories of crystal clear, refreshingly cool waters in which to revel at the end of a hot summer day.

Seventh - and this is the ugly one - roll up your pant legs and jump in.  Fortunately, over half of the water has evaporated during its uncovered winter.  Unfortunately, that leaves you with about a foot of something reminiscent of condensed pond water.  With twigs.

Eighth:  bail water like you're in a sinking boat.  Encourage the troops with memories of the pool at its brightest and best, and hope that it really is true that water striders don't bite, as you've been telling them.

Ninth:  when the youngest trooper is clearly losing heart, allow her to leave and trim around fenceposts instead.

Tenth:  know when enough is enough, even if the pool isn't emptied yet.  Cheer everyone with congratulations on how far you emptied it (halfway), what good workers and how strong they all are, and that popsicles will be forthcoming.

Eleventh.  Collapse on overstuffed chair and blog about it, in hopes that this season, we'll do things differently.  Starting with properly aligning that drain plug ....


[p.s. for anyone who's ever wondered about the obviously nonsensical word "buretachi" in this blog's address, it is a Japanization of our last name, meaning, roughly, the Bure-people]

borrowed thoughts on exercise

[excerpted from Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland]

Once, not needing to exercise in order to survive was a privilege and the hallmark of gentlefolk, who were identified by their soft white hands and merely vestigial muscles. Well rested, heartily fed, and flushed with excellent port, many of these sluggards lived to an overripe old age, annoying their heirs, while for those who exercised all day life was nasty, brutish, and mercifully short. We have failed to profit by their example. We have, as a nation, embraced voluntary, non-essential exercise.

For those of us left behind by the new wave, yawning, stretching,and reaching for the coffee cup are quite enough activity to liven up the muscles for the day. For the au courant, however, only violence will suffice. They rush out into the humid smog or the icy darkness and run as if demons were after them, coming back purplish, gasping, and awash in self-satisfaction and sweat. Sometimes, to set the gold seal on their virtue, they suffer from pulled hamstrings, tendinitis, shin-splints, and muggers. They support a while new branch of science called “sports medicine.”

Smugness is one of life's basic joys, and for the altruistic exerciser there's also the amusement he gives to onlookers and the rest of the family, who sit there dry and comfortable, reading the funnies, buttering their muffins, and rejoicing in sloth. The family cat, who stays fit as a fiddle on twenty-two hours of sleep a day, stretches luxuriously, smiles, and gets on with his nap.

As an extra delight, I'm told the fleet-footed sometimes experience what's called a “runner's high,” a fit of euphoria vouchsafed to those who have pushed it clear to the edge of cardiac arrest. God knows I'm in no position to report on this personally, but it sounds to me like the diver's problem, “rapture of the deep,” which involves nitrogen poisoning or oxygen starvation or something. Pleasure is where you find it.

The new, enlightened exercise is governed by a new, improved set of rules, mysterious to the outsider.  First, if you're having fun, as in dancing or skiing, no benefits accrue. No proper runner has ever been seen to smile; no proper lap-swimmer dangles at pool's edge sipping a cool drink and chatting with friends. Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painful, humorless, and boring.

Second, it must produce no useful effect on anything except your muscles, or some say, your cardiovascular condition. Mowing the lawn, sweeping the floor, and toiling up the basement steps with a basket of laundry are useless because of the irrelevant purpose involved; rowing a boat gets you, with luck and a favorable current, from point A to point B and is therefore not exercise. For exercise, there are machines (called “equipment”) that simulate mowing, rowing, sweeping, and stair-climbing, and these machines perform miracles for the body because they were designed to do nothing else; however long you labor at them, the laundry still languishes in the dryer and sassafras saplings sprout in the lawn. Perhaps you can hire someone to deal with them, thus doubling your outlay.

Third, exercise should cost money. Money proves that you're really serious about this body business, and the body, flattered, responds. There are dues to pay at the gyms and spas and pools, and the truly serious buy their own machinery. Friends of mine replaced their living-room couch with a rowing machine, most wondrously awkward to sit on. For years my brother stabled a sort of steel giraffe, called a NordicTrack, in the guest room. He was never seen to operate the thing, but it was useful for hanging up one's jacket or drying one's underwear, and effective in breaking the toes of guests trying to find the light switch in the dark. Presently it disappeared. I don't know how; it was much too heavy to steal or throw away. It had cost a fortune.

Even the runners, fleeing like purse-snatchers through the morning streets, have spent money. They carry patented weights in both hands, wear special running shorts or suits, dam the sweat from their eyes with special headbands, and buy shoes so expensive that simply contemplating them on the closet floor improves one's muscle tone.

Adhere to the rules and you too may find happiness. As I said, I'm not authority on the joy of exercising; for some of us it lies in more in the breach than in the observance. We can stroll to the window with our coffee cup, gaze down as the virtuous go laboring past, and enjoy a wholesome flush of pleasure at not being numbered among them.

[excerpted from Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland]

borrowed thoughts on joy

[excerpted from Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland]

"Subtly, in little ways, joy has been leaking out of our lives. Almost without a struggle, we have let the New Puritans take over, spreading a layer of foreboding across the land until even ignorant small children rarely laugh anymore. Pain has become nobler than pleasure; work, however foolish or futile, nobler than play; and denying ourselves even the most harmless delights marks the suitably somber outlook on life.

"It's an easy trap to fall into. Somehow bad news is easier to believe, more important, than good. Joyful people singing of blue skies always sound slightly simple-minded; the prophets of doom sound so much better educated, so much more likely to be right, and when they threaten us with cancer, global warming, gridlock, AIDS, war, famine, and pestilence, we listen closely and believe. The small pleasures of the ordinary day come to seem almost contemptible, and glance off us lightly. By bedtime they've vanished, lost among the ominous headlines, rude taxi drivers, and tight shoes looming in memory.

"Part of this is genetic programming. Back in the dawn of things, those who dawdled on the path smelling the flowers and smiling at the sunshine didn't last long enough to hand down their genes. The genes that traveled farthest were those of the most pessimistic, the most resistant to pleasures, the most alert to flies in their soup, tigers on the trail. They invented the angriest gods and prepared for the most menacing neighbors. Gloomy and suspicious, they slept with one eye open.

"We are their heirs. Scientific tests are proving that we notice and remember dark words more sharply than bright ones. They weigh more in our minds, as tigers weighed more than flowers.

"We may be overdoing it. Certainly we suffer more from stress, high blood pressure, insomnia, indigestion, and dark premonitions than other animals whose lives are more perilous than ours. It may not even be a sign of high intelligence; the clever dolphin, in spite of tuna nets, seems to celebrate all day long.

….

"Now we're left to wring joy from the absence of joy, from denial, from counting grams of fat, jogging, drinking only bottled water and eating only broccoli. The rest of the time we work. A recent study informs us that Americans in 1994 worked 158 hours (roughly a month) longer than we did in 1974.

"Our only permissible enjoyments now are public, official, and commercially regulated, as in Disney World, casinos, shopping, television, organized sport, and rock concerts. As long as somebody somewhere is making money out of us, we're useful to the economy, even patriotic: we're allowed to pay admission and play in the theme park.

"To make sure we aren't having any casual, private fun, the contemporary wisdom has withdrawn a lot of our older pleasures – chicken gravy, long summer vacations, sleeping late – and has replaced them with fitness and gloom.

…

"Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance. Bathrobes. Yawning and stretching. Real tomatoes. The magic day in January when it's clearly, plainly, joyfully no longer quite dark at five in the afternoon. Waking up in the morning and then going back to sleep again. The cold and limey rattle of a vodka-tonic being walked across the lawn. Finishing our tax returns. The smells of the morning paper, cut grass, and old leather jackets. Finding a taxi in a downpour; clean sheets; singing to ourselves in the car. Sitting by the fire picking sticktights off the dog. All the available gentle nourishments of the ordinary day. Properly respected, maybe they can lighten our anxious load.

"Indeed, pleasure may be almost as good for our health as broccoli; chemists tell us that happy people produce endorphins and enkephalins, brain chemicals that improve T-cell production and thus enhance immunity to cancer, heart disease, and infections.

"Let us then strive to be merry. Gloom we always have with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending. Pleasure itself is endangered."

[excerpted from Endangered Pleasures by Barbara Holland]

snippets

Lil' Snip, awhile back eating his first french fry, asked: "Are there mashed potatoes in these?"

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A homeschooling mother's victory: daughter pulling the wrapping off of a frozen pizza to exclaim "dendritic crystals!!" and sending an excited sister to find her magnifying glass.

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Lil' Snip (the only son among three daughters) looking adoringly at his colored pencil, which he has just discovered can be extended by twisting the end, cooing "cuuuute!" in an exact replica of our expressions over him.

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Spice one morning told me about a dream she'd had [my thoughts in brackets]:  "I had a dream last night about a monster [oh, no!] that I was chasing [you GO girl!] that turned into Truffle [(a beloved cat) - that's my girl, turning monsters into playmates!!]"

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Isaiah was showing me, rather vigorously, how he pats his head. "Be nice to your head," I told him, "because it's your head!"

"And," he reminded me, "my face is on it!"

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Spice asks me if she's a pessimist or an optimist. Trying to avoid labels, I tell her that she's just her. She counters with: "Does that mean that I'm a pessimist and you just don't want to tell me?"

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... and one from my Farmer:  My elliptical and I had started getting reacquainted (slowly), so I was disappointed to see that the bathroom scales hadn't moved in the direction that I had hoped. My husband, quick-witted, quipped "Boy, you must put on muscle fast!"

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happily hating my sofa

Fourteen and a half years ago, my Farmer and I, flush with wedding gift money, set out to buy a sofa for our little apartment.  We wanted something well-made, durable to withstand the years, and Scotch-guarded to withstand the children we were sure to have.

In the second store, we found what we were looking for - a classic design, of sturdy construction, long and deep enough for even my six-foot-one Farmer to nap on comfortably.

We decided to place an order, with a wing chair on the side, and were presented with the upholstery book.

We flipped through the samples, trying to recall our research:  olefin wears better than cotton, a pattern hides dirt better than solid, blue fades first.  I admired my mother-in-law's sofa, and looked for something similar, a neutral background with a small embroidered pattern.  There was nothing quite like it in the book, but we found something not too dissimilar, in colors we liked, and placed our order.  There were three swatches of the sample, a small pattern, a medium, and a large.

I assumed the small pattern would dominate.

A few weeks later, the sofa was delivered.  I stared in amazement.  The lines of the sofa were familiar, certainly, but had we really chosen this upholstery??  Large, bold flowers?!  Prominent vertical bars and a diamond crisscross of vines?  Where was the discreet pattern of small flowers and dots?!

I looked closer.  There, on the very tips of the cushions, was my small pattern.  But the entire piece of furniture was dominated by leafy vines, framed by loud flowers the size of my hand.  What had we done??

And it was made to last.

Sigh.

Well, fourteen years, two moves, three daughters and a son later, and I'm glad I'm not in love with my sofa, for it surely will not last the lifetime we expected.  There is a definite sag under our favorite end by the lamp, and the {admittedly pale} neutral background has, er, developed a bit of a patina from all the Farmer naps and bare-footed children.

Should I have told them to keep their feet off the sofa?  Banned all bare skin or unclean clothing to spare the upholstery?  Kept jumpers on the trampoline and builders restricted to Lincoln Logs?

I used to feel a little guilty that I let my children jump on the sofa (up till age 3 is the house rule), build forts with the cushions, and gallop around the house using cushions for horses.  Sort of like I was lacking in the responsibility department of parenthood.  But I have fond memories of doing the same, and after all, childhood is short ....

... and the upholstery is ugly.

theological quips

Lil' Snip is playing Tinker Toys with Nice.  He sidles up to me with a "tower" and confides, loudly, "Jesus has a s'prise for me!"  [I'm not sure how it's possible, but sadly, I forgot the rest of this intriguing conversation.]

Later, I overhear Nice informing Lil' Snip firmly, "God doesn't like Satan."

Sugar overheard it, too, and brings it up at the table while we're eating supper.  "Mommy, [Nice] told [Lil' Snip] that God doesn't like Satan.  I thought God loves Satan but is disappointed in him."

Hmmm ...

Lil' Snip, sensing the conversation turning philosophical, contributes an important tidbit:  "Jesus keeps his salt in the refrigerator."


It's so nice to know they're picking up on the important things we teach them ....

quips

Until I have something of substance to say (or at least have the guts to write out my substance-less thoughts; the well is still so dry), I give you my children's words:


Lil' Snip, watching me dose our ancient bathtub drain with baking soda & vinegar:  "It's simmering!"


Nice, eating candy hearts left over from Valentine's Day:  "Mmmmm!  The green ones taste like leaves! .... April Fools!!!"


"Pine cones!!!" cries Lil' Snip exultantly, holding up an alphabet puzzle piece of three ice cream cones.  "You can have one.  I get two."