Of Snow day, Pool maintenance

I am making up for yesterday with two posts today. We are dealing with Snow storm this weekend. I am typing this post while LHB and M are busy clearing our driveway outside!

I am dealing with this nagging headache today. Woke up thinking I will take a break from kitchen today but ended up making mutton liver fry, chicken pepper masala and peas jeera pulav. Story of my life!! *rolls eyes*

Alright, coming to the today’s topic, I want to write about how I single handled pool maintenance last year. As you all know, M was in India almost all summer and I decided to maintain pool so kids can have some fun! As its my luck, pool filter stopped working few days after M left to India. Let me tell you something, I call pool as M’s third baby as it requires that much of attention. Its high maintenance from all aspects.

LHB’s friend’s dad from our neighborhood stopped by to take a quick look and we found that the pipe closer to filter had air leak. He suggested to either call someone professional or try some DIY options. I spent next few days visiting local home improvement shops and seeking google baba’s help. Google and Youtube babas gave suggestions about a plastic mix that can be used to seal PVC pipes. I decided to give it a try as calling a professional would take long time and cost exorbitant money! Ordered the package in Amazon, it arrived 2 weeks later and one fine day I followed the instructions and applied this mix to seal air leak. In these two weeks, more algae formed and pool turned into dark green color!!

It was few days of wait time again to validate my DIY fix! And it worked yayyy! The happiness I felt on that day didn’t let me sleep 🙂

Now that filter started working, I let it run 24 hours and started following instructions from local pool store to kill all algae and bring water back to usable state. It took another 2 weeks with every day trip to pool store. The store guy could spell M’s last name by heart by the time the pool was ready 🙂 I woke up at odd hours to add shock as shock works better in absence of sunlight. I acted like a new born’s mommy caring for the pool 24×7. I had to feed the pool every two hours, brush the sides and floor, check filter, clean surface, check pH level et all.. Liquid shock gave better results so bought 5 gallon jars of liquid shock and dumped them in intervals. All this was learning at different level as I didn’t even know what a shock was until few weeks back!

One afternoon after few weeks of following all treatments religiously, Adi summoned me to backyard. She was like you have to see this Amma, just come for few minutes. I wrapped up my work call and went to backyard to see this beauty! I don’t know how to express that moment of happiness!

It was all worth the effort as pool was accessible. LHB used it many times, Adi/her friends had fun one of the days and I got to dip my feet 🙂