That's using your noodle

In a feat of master engineering and ingenuity Dan and I saved our back yard pool in time for a big helping of monkey soup at Lea's birthday party (but much more on that in a later post).

One weekend about 2 weeks back we noticed that the ring that holds air to keep the top of the pool up was needing to be inflated more than usual. Dan has always contended that we had a leak and I said it was just air gets hot and cools and it needs to be inflated sometimes. Well I think I was wrong all along, despite my protests to Dan that I'm always right.

I looked out one afternoon and the entire ring was flat as a pancake on an amoeba shaped pool that was thankfully still holding water. God love physics! The pool with the deflated ring held water for 2 days while we fashioned our solution. We discussed many options, including that can foam stuff that seals and insulates and expands once you spray it. However, Dan pointed out we would not be able to put it away for the winter any more because we would have permanent 14' ring. So I came up with shoving noodles in the ring.

Dan bought 40 noodles at the dollar store (he had to go to 2 to get all the noodles... we bought the town out of noodles!). He cut slits in the ring and created a 9 noodle diameter ring that has held up for weeks and throughout monkey soup!