Pool fool...

At the end of Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood makes a comment that "man has got to know his limitations."

Much as I try, I cannot be in two places at once. I was reminded of that this morning, when I tried to fill the kiddie pool I bought for my son.

Last night, my wife asked me to wake her up when I come back from shul in the morning so that she could help me fill the pool. When I came home, I assessed the situation, and decided that I could manage by myself, so why take away those precious moments of sleep from her? We did it together yesterday, but there wasn't anything so terribly complicated that I couldn't do it solo.

We don't have a water spigot sticking out of the wall like a lot of people have; we have just the regular kitchen sink faucet, and I had to buy an attachment that can adapt the kitchen sink into something that a garden hose can connect to. The only thing that the Home Depot had was a coupling system that had two pieces: one to screw onto the faucet, and then another piece that attaches to the hose and fits over the adapter with a locking mechanism.

Because the sink we want to use is in the kitchen, and the porch where the pool is is on the opposite end of the house, we also needed a long hose. My wife was in Target, and saw a 50-foot hose there for only ten dollars. When she called me excitedly from the store about the bargain, I was surprised myself: most hoses that long cost around twenty five dollars - ten dollars sounded too good to be true.

As it turns out, the hose was not quite what I had expected. When I envision a hose, I imagine something made of green rubber, hardy material that has structural stability, that practically falls into a neat coil when you're finished using it. The kind that hurts a lot when your brother smacks you with a foot long length cut from an old, unused hose. The type that Target was selling was a distant relative: a bright red vinyl thing, that smelled like new shower curtains.

Oh well, I thought, a hose is a hose, right? Sort of, but not really.

The main issue is that the hose has to be uncoiled from the porch through the living room, dining room, into the kitchen, and attached to the sink. I carefully played the hose out, keeping one end in the pool, and wound it through the house. I connected the coupler to the other end of the hose, and then fit the coupler over the adapter, and turned the water on full blast.

The reason why we did it together yesterday was so that we could watch the respective ends of the hose. I stood outside on the porch and watched the pool fill up; my wife stayed in the kitchen and kept an eye on the sink making sure everything was okay.

When you're doing things alone, you need to run back and forth between both ends. After turning the sink on, I ran alongside the hose to check that the water was coming out of the other end, as well as coming out into the pool, not the floor.

I hear the water in the hose, but I don't see anything coming out. I look down at the hose and see the problem: a regular, good quality rubber hose that has a cinch or a slight bend in it will accommodate the water pressure and straighten out on its own - not so a vinyl hose.

As that little bit of information is registering in my brain, I hear the clatter from the sink as the coupler comes flying off the faucet. The water's built up pressure has to go somewhere. That somewhere happened to be everywhere in my kitchen. Fifty feet (approximately, but who is counting?) of water emptied out onto the kitchen floor. As the hose came whipping off the sink, it must have sprayed, because the counter-tops look like erev Pesach all over again...

My wife is still sleeping, the kitchen is cleaned up now (more or less), and my son's pool is filled up. She doesn't have to know this ever happened, right?