Not quite a hole in the ground, not yet a pool. We’re past the halfway point now and the mess is everywhere. The company we hired never said the entire thing would be a disaster because they sure made it sound like could control and contain the demolition more to the general pool area we were making. Lies!

Everything that’s dirt used to be grass. Beautiful, wasteful grass. So we pulled up the water-intensive floor with our bare hands a pick axe and a shovel and are planning to replace it with kurapia ground cover. The front lawn is a goner, too, but I don’t have the energy or patience right now to have the front and back of my house in such an apocalyptic state.

Nick and I are extremely water conscious, so what gives with the pool? Well first of all it’s a luxury, and I won’t deny that. And it’s also a trade off of all the water and energy intensive things that this house has for a pool we’ve always wanted, one that in the long term uses less resources.

We’ve done the math and put in the work and we feel good about it.* Can we do more to save the Earth? Sure, yes, of course! And we have big plan to do that, but right now we want to live life a bit. Do you know what I mean, internet strangers?

So much these days is pretty binary, very absolute, black or white, all or nothing. But things are nuanced in reality — imperfect, and oscillating even. I can see this post and my thinking be pinned in some thread in the internet as an example of good, bad, evil, exceptionalism, or all the above. Sigh. I don’t have answers for that. We’re just doing our best.

Anyway, here’s progress of our pool.

*We reduced our water usage per household by more than half since last year and are planning to reduce it further by replacing fixtures and toilets to low-water use. We’ve also moved to solar and batteries so that our energy usage and car fuel usage is 99% produced by the sun.

Then when we factored the total reduction in grass, water-loving plants, replacing those with drought-tolerant, moving to drip systems, the planned addition of a rain tank to water the plants in the future and installing a grey water system, it’s even less usage we’re talking about.

We take these calculations vs the quantity of water needed fill the pool initially, top it off yearly, reducing evaporation almost entirely by installing a pool cover, and committing to heating it only by the sun. A little bit like guilt math, no? Yeah, I get it. It’s a lot like those carbon offsets corporations buy or private jet owners use, but at least it’s more than the people who are blissfully ignorant and doing nothing are willing to do or say.