It’s summertime and all you swimming pool owners know that the most important step in caring for a pool is filling it with cement and turning it into a tennis court.

This is a very logical step after you spend most of your summer and life savings each year trying to turn your pool into something more than a large science experiment dedicated to studying how algae grows, evolves, and eventually mutates into the Swamp Thing where it proceeds wanders around the neighborhood snacking on small dogs and scaring children.

Owning a pool is not like owning a bathtub because pool water has chemicals in it which must be regulated and watched slightly more often than a nuclear reactor. You have to keep track of pH levels, alkalinity levels, free chlorine levels, regular chlorine levels, algae levels, pee-levels, old Band-Aid levels and unidentifiable-objects-at-the-bottom-of-the-deep-end levels, all of which need to be constantly controlled by adding chemicals.

Want more pH? Add expensive chemicals.

Less pH? Add expensive chemicals.

Exactly the same pH? Add really expensive chemicals and never let anyone get within 100 feet of the water.

That’s because the more people use your pool, the more murky and cloudy and green your pool water is going to become. Ideally you should add chemicals to the point where your water is crystal clear and then cover your pool with an airtight Plexiglas cover and make everyone sits on the side of the pool and just talks about how refreshing and cool it would be to touch.

But if you choose to add chemicals to the point where your pool water is clean and clear and you choose not to cover your pool for some reason then you’ll definitely need to worry about the dead squirrels.

The pool-salesmen never mention the dead squirrels, of course. If you ask them they’ll say, “Dead squirrels? I’ve never heard of such a problem! Hahahaha!… Leave before I call security.”

You see: squirrels, being the cute, cuddly, curious creatures that they are, have brains slightly less evolved than the nuts they eat. Squirrels are constantly thirsty due to all those salted roasted peanuts and must drink water from time to time and usually reason, “Why settle for a little puddle in the middle of a busy street where twelve of my cousins were flattened by trucks last summer when I can drink of out a nice big totally truck-free swimming pool??”

So the squirrel dips his head in the pool, ignoring the fact that the water suspiciously smells like a Chlorox factory. A moment later the squirrel falls in the pool and thinks, “Wow, now I can drink a LOT!” and proceeds to prove it by drowning. Sure, squirrels are acrobats in the air, but they’re cows in the water.

You, the unknowing pool owner, find this out the next day when you dive into the pool surface right in front of a bloated, floating balloon of rotting flesh and fur with four legs bobbing in the shallow end. You say, and I quote, “AAAAAAIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!”

And then you proceed to vomit.

Which brings me to the last part of maintaining a pool: the filter. A filtration system is essential on any pool because it cleans the water of any small foreign objects which can usually be found in pool water such as clumps of hair, leaves from nearby trees, bits of fingers and approximately 30 billion dead bugs a day.

Unfortunately, most larger foreign objects such as pool tools, squids, dead squirrels (see above) and unwanted houseguests will clog up the filtration system and you’ll have to clean it out on a regular basis. It is usually best to clean the filter about once a week or when the water begins to solidify into a primordial ooze which gives birth to new and interesting lifeforms, whichever comes first.

Maybe one day you too will own a pool and you’ll be able to say, “Hey, Honey, I’m cleaning out the filter in the pool! I found your wedding gown, that extra set of silverware, my golf clubs and that whole Jimmy Hoffa thing isn’t a mystery anymore! Oh, and what’s this? AAAAAAIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!”

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I am constantly amused by the useless sorts of advertisements that Google Adsense slaps on my blog.

I put the little advertising bar along the side of my pages hoping to earn a few pennies for all the hours and hours of every night, lovingly hand-weaving these little words out of only the finest, most pure electrons I can find. And pennies they have been, mostly because Google, like many of my human readers, can’t figure out what the hell I’m usually writing about.

When I once wrote a humorous little piece about how I could “set fire to my desk” and suffer no consequences at the hands of my boss, Google Adsense plastered my blog with advertisements for “fireproof filing cabinets.”

And when I recently wrote a piece about my company’s wacky vacation process entitled “Logic Takes A Holiday” my blog was covered with ads for memory enhancers and brain boosting pills.

Oh, and recently I’ve started getting ads in Chinese.

Yes, Chinese.

Okay, maybe Japanese.

Or Korean.

I really don’t know. I don’t speak or read or write in any of those languages. I do know that I don’t know what on earth these advertisements are for. They could be advertising bootleg DVDs or a case of rice noodles or monkey brain snack bars for all I know.

And while I’m sure these are all valid products (”New Monkey Brain Snack Bars! The high-protein energy bar made from real simians! Now with less fur!”), I’m not really sure if most of my readers are interested in them.

Most of my readers are interested in beer, games to play at work when the boss isn’t watching and scantily-clad women. Incidentally, that pretty much describes the interests of 99.9% of all web surfers.

If Google really wanted to make some serious cash they’d build an advertising system that only gives you results for those things, no matter what you’re reading about…

For example, if you’re reading a page about plumbing on the Internet then all the ads would be for beer because, let’s face it, beer is more interesting than plumbing. And, really, the more beer you drink, the more you’re going to need that plumbing.

If you are reading about spreadsheets on the Internet, then Google would show you nothing but ads for games you’re interested in playing because Google knows everything about you and Google definitely knows what kind of games you like. Yes, even the naughty ones.

And of course, if you’re surfing the web and reading about the Pope, you’d get ads for scantily-clad women because no one but a Kind and Really Cool God could create something so wonderful as the string bikini and the women to wear them.

You should start to worry when Google starts showing you ads for funeral directors and coffins. See, Google even knows when you’re going to die.

If Google stops showing you any ads at all then you should begin crying immediately because you’re not going to make it home alive.

So what kind of bizarre ads will Google create for this blog entry? Will it promote links to beer games you can play at the office? Will it advertise database software to help with your plumbing? Or will it list sites where you can find photos of nuns in bikinis? All these things exist on the Internet, of course. Go ahead, use Google to find them.

Or will Google, in it’s infinite wisdom, cover my blog with ads that are even more bizarre and nonsensical?

Only Google knows…

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There is poo all over my house right now. Lots and lots of poo.

Today my wife and I woke up to a smell which can only be described as “exploded baby ass.” This was unexpected for two reasons:

1. Really, you never expect to wake up to an exploded baby ass odor.

2. We don’t have a baby yet. My wife is still (thankfully!) five months pregnant.

Rising from our bed we found a few small brown spots on the floor which we immediately blamed on the dog.

“Bad dog! Bad, bad, bad dog!” we exclaimed as the dog looked at us with complete innocence. Dogs are good at that. We could find the dog holding a smoking handgun and a bloody knife over a dead body and it could still look at us with an expression that simply says, “Yes? What are you looking at? I certainly didn’t do this!”

We quickly learned it was not the dog at all.

As we cleaned up the first few spots on the floor we found other spots down the hallway and soon we were following our own little trail around the house like Billy’s famous Family Circus dotted-line maps trails around the neighborhood.

Of course, instead of oversized black bars marking Billy’s trail we found putrid stinktastic globs of cat poo. And instead of a sickeningly sweet crappy pun at the end of our trail we found a sickened cat who was clearly just as surprised to see stuff dripping out his butt as we were.

So I grabbed the cat, tossed him in our spare bathroom for the time being, and spent the next hour cleaning up poo spots and throwing things in the washing machine.

I spent the rest of the day taking the cat to a vet’s office that happens to be open on a Sunday only to learn that there’s really not much they can do. For the moment our kitty is in solidary confinement with a dish of water and a litter box and we’re watching him closely. The worst part is that we’re still finding little spots as of this moment, six hours later.

Now that my wife is pregnant (no, she was nowhere near the cat poo) we’ve come to realize that this is just a very tiny glimpse into what it will initially be like to have a baby in the house: lots of poo and lots of worry.

Yay.

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