Our pool has been up for a week but it was too cold to swim in it until two days ago. What luxury it was to be immersed in water again! It's only three feet deep and eighteen feet wide but water is water to me.

The air temperature climbed up to a respectable humid hotness yesterday. It was eighty-six degrees outside and it was eighty-eight degrees in the pool. The pool gets more sunshine on it in this backyard than it did at the other place. Bill and I are more comfortable in the pool when the water temperature is at least eighty-six. So, we blissfully luxuriated for some time in our water wonder yesterday.

And then... Evidently, other people--most likely teenagers (sorry teens to pass such a judgement but it is too true)--thought it would be enjoyable to try our pool out, too. In the middle of the night sometime...

The evidence was glaringly there in the morning. The big duckie chlorine holder that circulates around the pool was out in the yard unscrewed and chlorine pellets scattered out of it. The next thing we noticed was that the water level of the pool was a lot lower. Bill discovered the reason for that when he saw the grass bent over for a couple of feet outside the pool obviously from having gallons of water gushing out on it. And the sand there was eroded and all over the place. Then Bill discovered that the water pump was sucking air instead of water and the little skimmer that was supposed to be attached to it was askew. Add all that up and the only conclusion we could come to was that somebody or somebodies were trespassing on our bliss.

At the end of our property, there is a creek. There is also a gap in the fence there so anyone could come up out of the creek and access the yard with no problems. Bill has been taking apart the raccoon cage but he had several sections of it left yet. He took one of them out there and wire-tied it to both sides of the fence to close the gap hoping that would discourage them. But the fencing on the left side of the yard is of the old wire type and flimsy, something that could probably be hopped over easily enough. And they can still just walk in through the side gate which has no lock on it.

The part that bugs me the most is wondering where they came from, how close do they live to us, and who the heck otherwise would have seen that pool in such a secluded backyard. Errrrggghhh. And, of course, there is always that violated feeling in something like this. And the feeling that now we can't leave anything out in the yard. A motion detector is just about our only other course of action unless we could afford an electric fence around the whole place.

Oh, well, there is just so much that we can do to prevent it from happening again. If they hadn't left so many signs of disturbance we wouldn't have been clued in on their mischief. So, now they've ruined it for us and for them as well.