Last summer Iain was mighty happy with himself when he found a MASSIVE (and I mean MASSIVE) swimming pool on eBay dead cheap for the kids to have in the garden. It was about 275 feet across and 77 feet deep and when you multiply that up you will realise that it held around a trillion gallons of water. For those of you not good with figures this means it was MASSIVE. We had to move things around in the garden to make room for it and had steps to climb up the side. Oh, and it came with a tarp for the top but as you can guess, this was never taken out of the packaging. It did have a pump system. The pump was supposed to circulate the water and keep it clean. There was even a wee floaty thing filled with chlorine to keep the pee from contaminating the circulated water.

When it arrived the outer ring had to be inflated and the pool had to be filled. With one hose pipe on constantly it took (honestly) around two days to fill. I had real issues with the amount of water that was being used but the kids loved the idea of having their own pool and Iain was, as I said, mighty pleased with himself.

Once it was in place on our patio area I had a couple of thoughts about the durability of the sides and how on earth it was going to be emptied. Iain assured me on both counts. The sides were extra special and "It wont be a problem to empty it."

I can't tell you the amount of sleepless nights I had thinking about the pool bursting and flooding our neighbour's garden - which is prone to flooding at the best of times. I was anxious about it and kept my head down when meeting the neighbours in case they mentioned the sheer volume of water contained in this flimsy pool . . . you get the idea. I didn't consider this to be the best idea my husband had ever had.

The kids were able to use it for two days last summer. Hmm . . ok. . . let's be generous. . . THREE days then.

In the past couple of weeks I have been doing a little bit around the garden. One evening I cleared the greenhouse out and over the next week or so was able to sow some seeds, transplant some plants and do a general tidy up. My enthusiasm jumped to Iain and he started a bit of digging and weeding too.

Yesterday I worked late for the first time in ages meaning that Iain went home on his own and was there for about 30 minutes unsupervised. (Big mistake!) On the way home I thought about doing a quick 15 minutes in the greenhouse before tea and then straight to bed.

There was no one to be seen when I arrived home. The house seemed to be empty. I went in to the back garden and witnessed my watery nightmare. Obviously the pool must have finally split - there was water everywhere, our garden was flooded and torrents of water were heading from three holes in the pool towards the neighbour's garden.

I immediately waded in to survey what could be done - to find Iain happily splashing in the middle of it all. It hadn't split - he had taken the three plugs out. He was emptying it with so little planning that he hadn't even put his wellies on.

I think I went in to a little bit of shock. I ran to the greenhouse, grabbed four buckets and my wellies and started trying to catch bucket loads of the pouring water to empty down the drain. After about 10 trips to the drain Iain shouted at me for being so dramatic and sighing all the time - I wasn't sighing - I was gasping for breath! There was no difference in the level of water in the pool.

Things are a bit of a blur after that. I insisted that he stop the pouring to allow us time to think. Surely there were hoses we could rig up. We couldn't allow the water to flood the neighbours. Iain thought the water would simply drain away in to the water table under the house. . I thought differently. After a while we got a conveyor belt system on the go - I used a hose to fill the buckets and Iain emptied them. After about 50 trips there was still no visible difference to the level in the pool.

Part of our future problem was - the three holes were at different heights - as the water emptied each hole would become unusable and the lowest one was the furthest away from the drain. I reckoned there would be hosing at B&Q that we could fit to the larger gauge stuff the pump used and simply leave it in the drain, allowing it to empty over night. Iain refused to spend money when we could just empty it by hand. Did I mention how broken my back was by this point?

Oh, and the pump. . . Bailey had chewed through the lead for it ages ago. I made Iain fit another plug to it but once that was in place the pump was so ineffective it was quicker to suck it up with a straw and spit it out ourselves. We ditched that idea and went back to the one where the water filled the water table. . .

We picked the hole closest to the drain and allowed the water to spill out. We then brushed the water towards the drain. After 10 minutes of this it struck me that by fixing the hose back on we could direct the water closer to the drain and therefore save our muscles. We rigged that up and then I remembered I had (half) guttering on the side of the greenhouse so we detached that and made a wee waterway from the pool, through the hose and then three bits of guttering to the drain.

THAT was fine for a while but the water level finally fell below the level of the hole and the emptying stopped. Iain worked out that he could stand on the pool side and lower everything and the emptying all started again.

I seriously doubt my husband's sanity at times. He started this with no planning, no working out and no help. He seriously thought he could just let the three trillion gallons of water just empty with no concept of the effects of it all.

Once the guttering was in place it was just a matter of standing there and waiting - that became a one person job. Iain worked out it was a one person job and cheerfully announced he was off to walk the dog.

Blink.

I found I couldn't move because when I took my feet off the pool the hose moved and the guttering, which was all fairly delicately balanced, all fell apart. About 15 minutes after Iain left I realised I needed a hand with putting the guttering back together so took my mobile phone and rang the house to get David out from the XBox Lure to help. It rang and rang and rang. I looked up at the patio doors to see Jessica standing with the house phone in her hand - waving it and mouthing the words "The phone's ringing" to which I waved the mobile back at her and shouted "I FUCKING KNOW" (no I didn't).

Jessica then came out to help and I tried to think of the whole thing as one of those tv games where one person has to direct another, blindfolded, person to carry out simple tasks. My choice of words became very important. "The green thing", "the thingy" and "don't get your feet wet" all became meaningless.

Finally I had her bring over a big empty plant pot for me to sit down on and I chose to think of this as my director's chair.

I also wondered if this would be the start of her engineering career. Will she always think of this night as the time she realised she wanted to build tunnels and aqua-ducts and bridges? Or will she just have a fear of large garden swimming pools from now on?

When Iain returned with tea the draining had eventually stopped - he can empty the rest himself - I reckon THAT may be a one person job and there isn't enough in the pool now to worry about if he just lets it empty now.

All sense of humour was well and truly lost. There is nothing funny about this situation and if Iain ever mentions filling this pool again I will find somewhere to insert the hosing telling him it wont be a problem to empty it.

Tags: House, Jessica, Iain, Pool, Garden, Greenhouse

That's the longest break I have ever had from blogging since I started - it wasn't meant to be - things just kind of got in the way. And I have been a bit stressed about a few things so that tends to keep me away from the internet in general never mind the blog. For days at a time I go no where near the internet and have lost all interest in most of the RSS feeds in my reader which now tells me I have thousands of unread items.

No one emailed to see what was going on so I mustn't have been missed much!

Remember Iain wrote his car off a while back? Sharing a car was starting to lose it's novelty value, especially as the children had to get up on their days off to take Daddy to work.

After many many weeks (about four months!) we finally found a car good enough for Iain to be interested in. We got it on Easter Tuesday and I drove it to a wedding-shoot on the Thursday and by the Sunday it had packed up and needed hospitalised. It basically stopped dead in the middle of the fast lane of the motorway half a mile from our exit.

Iain and I both went in to shock over this. Yea, it is only a car but we had spent so long looking for a good one, we had taken a loan from his parents to be able to afford this one and now it had made a fool out of us by going and breaking down. Within days of us driving the car in to our drive-way we had to be towed home and then have not one but two breakdown trucks flashing their lights in to the neighbours bedrooms in the middle of the night. . . it was just more than we could bear to be honest.

We had a very paranoid week thinking that the seller had passed on a dud but the thing that went wrong wasn't something that could have been predicted so that calmed us down a little. Even so, we had to part with £900 to get it out of the garage (he knocked off a fiver for us - yay!).

We are now back up to two cars again but after travelling together for so long it has proved to us that we don't need two every day and we do tend to leave one at home most days still.

The kids are fine. David is now needing showers every day and we have to drag him kicking and screaming to the tins of deodorant which tend to gather dust in his room. I don't like the idea of him growing up like this - he is almost as tall as us now and can actually wrestle Iain to the ground if Iain isn't prepared for it. He isn't a baby, a toddler or even a small child anymore. He argues with everyone including his own shadow and bullies Jessica terribly.

Jessica wakes up moaning, moans throughout the day, moans about going to bed and if I listen carefully now, I am sure I can hear her moaning in her sleep.

As I said - they are both fine.

Work has changed for me ever so slightly over the past while for a couple of reasons. The first one is; I have had a friend working with me part time for a couple of months. This month she will be with me almost full-time while she looks for a proper full-time job. She is doing loads of creative stuff that I don't have time for but also the kind of thing which is out of my league either skills-wise or because I could do it but would take forever to get round to finishing.

This timing has been quite good for me - I needed a good boot up the backside to really get my business going - crank it up a notch - and having to pay a (albeit a small) wage is making me be a little more proactive when it comes to enticing the customers in through the doors. We have added to the range of products the studio offers and with her Photoshop skills we are starting to produce exciting things like books and nicer albums, the likes of which my customers have never seen before.

I also have jumped in to a new venture. I have devised a kinda "bonny baby" competition for primary school children. We sat and thought it through with the help of another friend in the business and had leaflets and fliers printed. It finally launched it this week in the local newspaper. On the first morning we went in to the cafe next door and I read the OTHER local newspaper with a sinking heart. It looked to me that the other paper was a much better place to advertise and I really thought I had made a mistake right at the very start of the project by placing the ad in the wrong publication.

Much to my delight, that first day we received more calls than we could handle - in the first week I reckon we have taken more than a normal month's worth of
bookings and I am now having to pace myself and not over-book days to maintain energy levels.

It is very nice having someone else in the office - it is great company - someone to bounce ideas off - someone you can rely on to raise the quality of the work being produced and someone you can leave to get on with the important things while you investigate other avenues of income. While I am not having to do the day-to-day things she is doing, I can get on with taking the business to a new level. For example, I am working out of the studio next week taking photos of something for a software company who create console games. It is all very hush-hush at the moment and my name wont be on any of the games - but it is still an interesting thing to put on my cv at a later point.

There ya go - a quick update for you. What's been happening where you are?

Tags: Life, Work, Break, Blog