Wild Kingdom

I don't have a swimming pool for a couple of reasons. First, they are eye-wateringly expensive, and second, they are a major pain in the ass to maintain.

Now, Gekko, who lives in a State that's nearly as incandescently hot as Texas, has a pool, but she's a high-dollar techie which means she can afford a couple of them, and also is not nearly as lazy as I am, not to mention which even if she WERE that lazy, all she has to do is smile and be a hot redhead and all, and she'd be chin-deep in men scooping leaves and trash out of the thing.

Not saying that she would of course, but...well, I would, if I could, but I couldn't get that to work for me except in a very limited market, none of which is in Texas outside of Austin, where I understand that fat old guys make the studs quiver.

I digress.

The operative point here is that I don't have a pool.

However, referring back to "incandescent," (see also "smouldering," "blistering," "hellish," "you've got to be fucking kidding me with this heat, it's only June,") it became clear that I needed some way to sit neck-deep in cool water and drink Jack Daniels. So I bought a so-called "pop-up" temporary pool. You can pick them up at WalMart for about $250, and when the summer heat finally melts the friggin' thing into a lump of gently bubbling plastic, it can be rolled up and tossed in the dumpster, which reduces the maintenance considerably. They look like this...

A Pool Like Mine, But With Classy People In It

...except replace the wads of happy folk with one large-sized drunk floating genteelly in the pump-stream around the perimeter, submerged to the shoulders, and supported, along with a glass full of ice and Jack, by a couple of foam floating snakes.

I'm nothing if not classy.

So, anyhow, the Beneficiary and I were in it the other evening, watching the 110º-in-the-shade sun going down when one of the lawn cats, who are too short to see what's going on in the pool, decided to jump up on the inflated ring for a visit.  (See "Cats, Curiosity, Fatality Rate and Popular Culture.")

The ring floats on the water, and is what supports the wall of the pool. It's pretty sturdy, but is slicker than snot, which means that our first indication of the incoming cat was when he bounced/slid over the ring and hit the water, followed 1/100th of a second later by a panicky scramble back up over the ring and out and becoming a soggy comet of watery fur streaking across the lawn.

Now, you may ask, since the ring is so slick, how was the cat able to scramble out of the water? Because cats have claws. And claws are NOT good for floating air-filled things. But at first, there was no problem. Everything seemed to have survived, and there were no leaking spots that I could find.

But it turns out that just because I couldn't find them didn't mean they weren't there. Teeny little pinholes, it seems, sooner or later do bad things. Much later in the evening, I noticed the sag beginning. Crap.

Now, the problem is that if the sag gets bad enough, it will sink below the water level and water will begun running out. The weight of the water pushes it down further, which makes more water run out, and the spiral continues, and continues VERY rapidly, until the water level falls below the ring again.

So, I figured I'd be sticking a patch on the pool in the morning.

The next morning, I stepped outside, and discovered that the pool was about 1/4 empty. The ring wasn't in NEARLY that bad a shape - which meant that something had actually physically pushed the ring down below the water level, starting the cycle and dumping about 500 gallons of water across the lawn. What had happened?

Here are the clues:

1. A few weeks ago, a neighbor discovered that one of the neighborhood cats had squeezed out five kittens, and had been raising them in their RV's external storage lockers. The mother cat had disappeared (being an outside cat, she was subject to the vicissitudes of wildlife and accidents, and there's no telling what happened to her.) There were two other outside cats who had also downloaded recently. One had three kittens remaining, and the other had only two, which meant that both had more tits than kittens. So we took the five and split them up, dumping them into the kitten piles of each of the mother cats, thus winding up with two adult females with TEN (10) kittens between them. We figured there was no way that more than half would survive.

All ten did.

And they are now about the cat equivalent of pre-teens or young teenagers, which means they spend all their time playing and fighting and rolling each other around and executing all kinds lolcats cuteness. Nauseatingly cute, in other words. But not this morning - this morning there warn't no cute to be had. They were all soggy masses of wet kitten, all in a "mood," and all disgustedly cleaning themselves in the morning heat.

2. This was in the bottom of the pool:

Yeah, It's Real. Yeah, It Was Really In The Pool

It was bigger than my outspread hand and dead, of course. Tarantulas can't swim for shit, which is why you practically never find them around (never mind in) largish bodies of water. Another little known fact about tarantulas is that cats in general and kittens in particular are fascinated with the things, and will bat them around like a handball whenever they find one. Which is why I haven't seen any around the place for a couple of years.

So, looking at the clues, the obvious answer is that there was an unfortunate incident involving kittens and the local wildlife. I'm guessing that either the spider made it up onto the ring of the pool or was chased up there. Either way, the thing marching around like tarantulas tend to do would have made the kittens (who are still young enough that they all hang around in a more-or-less pack) absolutely nuts. Eventually some number of them were slapping the thing, with the rest watching from below. The spider slipped, fell, or was slapped into the water and promptly sank like a stone at about the same time the kitten pile on the now-only-semi-inflated ring reached some critical mass, and the wave of water poured out.

On the up-side, the yard cats have now been properly chlorinated and anti-algae dipped. So there's that.

In Our Next Episode: Finding Kitten Holes: Not as creepy as it sounds.