Last Sunday, Vicki and I opened the pool. It was a perfect day for it: clear, warm but not hot, with a slight breeze. We loved how easily our new winter cover came off - probably about 1/10th the effort of the old one, where we had to drain water and scoop wet leaves off of it and then struggle to get the still-quite-heavy sheet off the pool without dumping the remains of the dirty water into the pool. The one unpleasant surprise this year, at least for me, was discovering that the pool was absolutely green with algae! Apparently this style of cover, which is designed to be porous enough to allow the snow melt to seep back into the pool, also lets in enough sunlight in the spring to promote a ton of unwanted growth under there! As a result, I've been spending time this week vacuuming all of that out, which is worse than the pool-opening cleaning that was required in previous years. But we still came out well ahead of the game with the new cover.
On Monday, Julie, Cooper and I did our first big woods walk of the year in which the signs of the season were impossible to miss. This is my last season to see there for the first time, as we started walking last year in early September, when summer was still hanging on. Here I am strangling - I mean, restraining! - Cooper who desperately wants to get back into the river for another swim!
And here are my walking partners, in all their seasonal glory, against a backdrop that's absolutely bursting with life at long last:
I, for one, am utterly sick of winter, despite the many great walks and amazing sights we took in over the five or six months it seemed to last this year!
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