McGee: Makeshift pool keeps us cool

I heard that someone actually stole one of those blue pools you see all over the place. You know the ones; they’re huge plastic blobs with an inflatable ring at the top to support it. I guess it wouldn’t be too hard, come to think of it. Just collapse the side, let the water gush out, roll it up and slink away like a dirty rat in the night.

I say “dirty rat” because that’s just flat-out cold; stealing someone’s swimming pool.

The Lady of the House and I had one of those big, blobby pools a while back. It came with a ladder to get in and out of the thing, a filtration system and chemicals to keep it clean and sparkly. That cool, clear water sure was inviting on hot summer days. We strung a line from the house to the back fence running over the pool, threw a blue tarp over the line and we had shade from the sun.

“Why are we settling for a plastic pool we have to put up and take down every year?” The Lady of the House asked one day.

“Umm, because we don’t have enough money for a permanent one?” I answered.

“I have an idea,” she said.

And so we went shopping for a permanent pool. We looked in this store, we looked in that store, we looked in catalogs, we looked on-line until we found just the right one.

Now we spend our hot summer evenings staying cool in the way of the Great American Southwest in our two-foot wide, eight-foot long, three-foot deep metal cattle tank out back on our covered patio.

The Lady of the House reads a book and I fiddle with my 50-cent yard sale AM radio scanning for faraway stations. Ahh, life doesn’t get much better than this.