Dirt!

Wow! Last night we got a dirt storm of the sort that usually occurs in late July and August around here. That, plus spitting, dirty rain. Thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour winds picked up tons of disturbed topsoil — all those half-baked housing developments that never got built left the desert all torn up — and dumped most of it into my swimming pool.

It was still raining at 3 a.m., when I got up and did a couple of hours of work on the Project That Will Not End. Went back to bed around 5:30; at 7 when the dog and I rolled out of the sack once and for all, rain was still falling. It stopped at Cassie’s command — the Queen of the Universe, Who hates to get wet, needed to use the facilities — and it hasn’t started again.

By light of day, it became evident that the pool is no longer filled with water. Mud is what it contains. I’ve never seen so much dirt in the pool, not even after the Great Dust-Up of 2011.

This was after I’d swept the steps and walls. The water’s roiled because the pump’s running. After a couple of hours, it will have pushed the sunken leaves and debris into a couple of mounds on the north side of the pool, making it easy for me to scoop them out so they won’t choke Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Once the worst of the trash is lifted out, Harvey will have to go in and vacuum up the mud that’s settled to the bottom — that brown streak to the north of the steps is dirt that’s settled out of the water, and the dark patches are just some of the leaves, twigs, and spent blossoms that are already beginning to coalesce.

First, though, the pump will have to run for several hours to pull as much of the dust-laden water through the filter as possible. And that, of course, will clog the filter, so that, after having blown my diddle-it-away savings on a birthday present for M’hijito, I will have to call the service guy and have him take the thing apart and clean it out. Whoop-de-doo.

Running the pump without Harvey connected will also skim off the floating debris. This is after the big stuff was lifted out:

All…over…the…surface…of…18,000…gallons…of…water…  What a mess!

Dumped an extra load of chlorine in there.

One thing that has to be said for the strategy of changing out the water every two years: The $200 cost more than pays for itself in chemicals and service calls. Over the past year, I’ve bought one, count it (1), Costco container of chlorine tabs to the tune of $80, and there’s still about a third of them left. I’ll have to buy another boxful in a month or so. You need to dump a lot of acid in until the water is stabilized — chlorine tabs, I’m told, contain stabilizer, but it takes several weeks for them to kick in. Acid, though, is very cheap.

And instead of hosting the pool repair guy every few weeks, I think I’ve had the new guy in here twice over the past year or so.

Since I’ve started draining and refilling the pool every second year, the thing has been practically maintenance-free…especially after I got rid of the devil-pod tree. Never thought I’d exult at cutting down a shade tree, but I must say, that was the messiest tree I’ve ever seen, even more so than the three eucalyptus trees I once planted to protect a house from a 30 percent rate increase by Arizona Public Service.

Heh. My neighbor never stopped bitching about those things!

It looks like this kind of weather is going to be the new normal, along with increasingly extreme heat during the summer. Used to be that 108 or 110 was a very hot day, indeed. Now 110 is par for the course from June through September, and we often get 115- to 118-degree days. In Sun City, where all the landscaping is gravel and people erect those trailer-courtly metal overhangs as patio covers, SDXB routinely reports 120-degree temps on his back porch.

The guy writing for the L.A. Times who predicted this area will become unlivable within the next few decades is probably right. Between the drought, which is not expected to end anytime in the foreseeable future, and the steadily increasing heat, the capacity of this land to sustain 1.1 million-plus residents is questionable. To put it mildly.

I expect about the second summer of 120- to 125-degree days will inaugurate an exodus. Some things are worse than higher property taxes and snow.

Me, I’d like to move to Oregon, since I can’t now and never will be able to afford the Bay Area. At least they have humane end-of-life policies there.