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Pthoolhu

Page history last edited by Cleolinda 14 years, 11 months ago

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The Great God Pthoolhu: A mysterious entity with a timeshare in our pool.

 


 

 

Selected entries

 

 

Anyway, my stepfather had checked on the waterline and discovered that it was way down at the bottom--more than you could account for through evaporation alone. There must be a leak, and we were hoping it wasn't the return of the carpenter ants. So Pool Guy comes out and detarps the pool. And Mom comes home for lunch. And Pool Guy asks her to come look at it. And then she comes back in and asks me to come look at it. I'm getting kind of intrigued by this time, so I go out there. There's a thick four or five-inch layer of algae on the wall at the waterline... but it's very, very low, which suggests that most of the water drained out pretty early on, and the amount of sitting water has been relatively low. In fact, the shallow end of the pool is completely uncovered by water--I hesitate to say "dry," because...

 

"What do you make of those marks?"

 

There's a thick coating of algae on the pool floor, but it's... unusual. There's a parting in the middle where it looks like something large was dragged--or dragged itself--down into the deep end, which is a sloping pit of four or five feet of semisolid green sludge and leaf detritus. The strange part, though, is that there are several ribbon-thin drag marks rippling down on either side of the main drag, as it were. It looks weird. Unearthly, even.

 

"I hope you've got a few hundred dollars stashed away for a rainy day," I tell my mother, "because I think we're about to have to get into some Pthoolhu removal."

 

 

 

Pthoolhu secreted a colony of "subterranean ants" ("Even worse than carpenter ants!" Which sounds so marketing-department to me. "Thicker thoraxes! Chewier mandibles! Bigger leaks and repair bills than ever before!") in the deck surrounding the pool. He still lurks under the last two feet of sludge that we haven't pumped out yet.

 

 

 

Speaking of cleaning, Jack the Pool Guy came and pumped out the pool and ripped out the old leaky liner and Cook's Pest Control came and doused it in water-based carpenter ant poison (hungry ants: the reason we keep losing pool liners), and then Jack came back and caulked the naked pool back over and put the new liner in and I assume that they're filling it with water now. YAY POOL. This does, however, mean that Sawyer the tree pool frog is no longer with us. I don't really know where he went, except that my mother was standing on the patio watching Jack empty the pool (apparently Pthoolhu had gotten word and evacuated the night before, which kind of explains the slimy slurping sounds I heard in the backyard last night), and Jack goes, "Here you go," and THROWS SAWYER THE POOL FROG AT HER. A little grey-green pool frog about the size of a ping-pong ball, STUCK TO HER ARM.

 

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEHHHHEHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE AHHHHHHHHHHHEAAAAAGH GET IT OFF! GET IT OOOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFF!"

 

So I don't really know where Sawyer is now.

 

 

 

Pthoolhu escaped our pool-draining efforts in the night and has been grumpy ever since. The pool frogs, led by our friend Sawyer, were louder than ever, which caused us to do some logical calculus and realize that, if we had cleaned, relined and refilled the pool and the frogs were still there... they must be in the water. Seriously, it took us way too long to figure that out. In our defense, however, they stay in the trees during the day, so it's not like you could look into the pool and see them. No, the freaks frogs come out at night. In fact, we called Animal Control to come look at the situation, and Animal Control Guy told us that we probably had about a hundred frogs in the trees behind our house. Clearly, Pthoolhu was raising an amphibian army to revenge himself on us all.

 

 

See also

 

 

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