Tag: swimming pool

Emerald

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Cape Town swimming pool owners. Have you looked under your pool cover lately?

I lifted our cover this morning. Oh dear.

I hadn’t touched the cover in quite a while (does it show?): it’s just been there for the last n months, doing the whole “preventing evaporation” thing. And, I have to say, doing it quite well in all honesty. Check out my water level!

But yes, while the metaphorical cat has been studiously ignoring the pool, the murine algae has been having a field day.

It’ll clean up quickly with a bit of spit, polish and sodium hypochlorite though. And it’s not like I can see us getting much use out of it this year anyway: evaporation is too much of a risk and with nothing falling from the heavens to refill it, it could result in damage to the pool or to the pump.

This is clearly (poor choice of word) a First World Problem, but right now, it’s my First World Problem and that’s why I’m blogging about it.

Swimming Pool Hippo Is Dead

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Just for the sake of completeness, and somewhat belatedly (I’ve been busy doing life), a quick update on the state of the hippo which got stranded in a swimming pool in Nylstroom.
Actually, the title of the post may have rather given the game away already.

The hippo is dead.

“Solly” was doomed as soon as people got all soppy over his plight and gave him a name, thus immediately humanising him and making it far more emotionally draining for all concerned when he popped his clogs. Questions have to be asked as to whether he would have survived if the vet hired to tranquilise him hadn’t arrived four hours late, but they won’t be asked, because we have far more important questions to be asked.

Questions like:

Who on earth is going to go and stay at the Monate Game Lodge near Modimolle, when their pool looks like this?

(and I’m not talking about the 1 ton of Hippopotamus amphibius therein.)

Fortunately, due to draconian export legislation, we have a surfeit of swimming pool cleaning apparatus here in South Africa and I’m quite sure they will constantly get stuck in one corner clean all that hippo crap out in no time at all.

Meanwhile, in Nylstroom…

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(…which is actually now called Modimolle): Please excuse the poor English. Yes, there is a hippopotamus trapped in a swimming pool in Limpopo. And no, this never used to happen in Sheffield. UPDATE: Not to be outdone, the DA in Cape Town has revealed that it’s not just ANC-controlled municipalities that have hippo issues:

Residents in Zeekoevlei, in Cape Town, have been asked to keep a look-out for a renagade young hippopotamus which is popping up in gardens and roads after moving into a lake there. City officials are hoping the 2-year-old calf will return back to its pod after appearing in an unfenced reserve following the theft of part of the boundary fence in the neighbouring water body where it lives.

It’s almost African…