We've opened our pool (three weeks earlier than ever) due to nasties growing in the warming water. Danged if it might not be briskly tolerable by Easter! (We don't heat it).
So this timely PSA:
Drowning, it turns out, does not look like drowning. It often looks like nothing at all. From your point of view at the pool side, in the cabana, at the beach, or on the boat, drowning simply looks like this: The person simply isn't there any more because they quietly slipped to the bottom of the water after quietly struggling mostly out of your sight.
The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. "I think he thinks you're drowning," the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. "We're fine, what is he doing?" she asked, a little annoyed. "We're fine!" the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. "Move!" he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, "Daddy!" How did this captain know - from fifty feet away - what the father couldn't recognize from just ten?...Read that here.
Drowning is the second most common cause of accidental death among children. Between 500 and 1000 Americans under the age of 15 will drown this year, about half of them within 25 feet of an adult who does not see it happening, and in about one in ten cases the parent will be watching as it happens, watching the kid drown, not realizing what they are seeing. [More]
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On a hilarious note you'll all enjoy, seconds after I hit the "submit" button for my taxes, I noticed Jan's 1099 for Social Security I had failed to include. Since it was her first year, TurboxTax didn't prompt me to add it. Well, it probably did, but I forget how really, really old she is.
Filing an amended return is a hassle, BTW.
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Missed another rain. Planters are stopped.
I'm calling it the "Dozen Drought*".
*(2012 - get it? I kill me!)
3 comments:
Sleeping on the sofa? You're supposed to say: "in my eyes she's still my youthful bride"
Why don't you put a heater in the pool for the grandchildren? The gas would not cost any more than for drying corn! And the little guys will love you for it!!!
anon:
We don't heat the pool so we can toughen the little weasels up!
Actually, the pool gets too hot sometimes in the late summer. Anything over 85 is bath water, IMHO.
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