Pool's Open

But no one will be swimming in it for a while unless they are crazy a member of this club. It's freezing out there.
We The Guy started the process on Saturday afternoon by taking the pump out of the pond*, going to the hardware store to buy a new piece of hose the correct diameter to replace the one that "got lost" during the winter, attaching hose to pump, dropping it into the water that had accumulated on the pool cover since last September and flicking on the switch in the kitchen. (No not that one, that's the outdoor lights. No, that's the tree light. No that's the balcony. Hang on... By connecting the cable to the pump and turning on the switch). Then we pumped water, Saturday until dusk and all Sunday, by which time had a nice, dry cover with a few inches of leaves all ready to be scooped onto the leaf pile.
Then it started to rain. It poured down all Monday, a good 2" by the end of the day. A lot of which sat right there on the pool cover again. So we started the pump going again this morning. By the time the guys (as opposed to The Guy) arrived to actually open the pool we still had a fair bit of water on the top, and it was raining again.
They will come back again tomorrow to make sure the system is working, I think there is going to be a problem with the return, maybe even the pump itself, and we are finally getting a replacement timer for the one that hasn't worked since we bought the place so I think we'll have to charge people to swim this year. Or maybe even to look at it.

*we use the tiny pond pump to pump the water off the cover because neither of us can figure out how to use the actual pool pump to do it