Sometimes things happen in life that cause you to really stop and question whether or not it was pure chance that you were in the right place at the right time, or whether destiny brought you to that particular situation. Although I have never been a strong believer that every step along life's path has been pre-planned, I have always held the belief that destiny plays some role in many of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs along the way.
My latest brush with destiny began about a month ago and would probably have never occurred if it were not for what my ex wife so affectionately referred to as my anal retentiveness. "Neat freak" was the other term she sometimes used. I tend to think she was exaggerating a little, but then again, the reason she is my ex is because we didn't exactly see eye to eye on a lot of things.
Although I am not obsessive about it, I do believe in the motto, "A place for everything, and everything in its place." Given that I routinely follow that advice, I was a little surprised to come home from work and discover one of the lounge chairs beside my pool was out of place. OK, maybe I am anal retentive. Three lounge chairs angled along the pool deck on each side of the pool with a small drink table shared between every two chairs. Damn it! I hate it when my ex wife is right.
I felt a little bit like Papa Bear in The Three Bears fable. "Somebody's been sleeping in my pool chair." Maybe I was overreacting. I was out at the pool over the weekend, maybe I just didn't get the chairs put back in the right place. Nothing to lose sleep over, that's for certain.
Having quickly dismissed the observation as nothing more than sloppy housekeeping on my part, I decided to continue on with what had brought me to the pool in the first place, my nightly after work dip in the tranquility of my secluded back yard oasis.
On this particular evening, I had opted to take advantage of the privacy offered by the shrubbery that completely surrounds the pool area and make this my private "clothing optional" beach. Ok, truth be told, I was a little behind on laundry and didn't have a dry swim suit in the drawer. Now that is not the profile of a neat freak, is it? Maybe there is hope for me after all, Dr. Freud.
The pool area pretty much covers my whole backyard. As you walk out the patio door of my house, the back yard is enclosed in a seven foot tall iron fence, a requirement of the local zoning commission for pool owners. The previous owners of the house had obviously liked their privacy and had planted some sort of ivy around the fence. I'm not much of a horticulturist, so I have know idea what it is, but it is certainly thick and dense and provides a 100% privacy from everything except satellites and low flying aircraft.
Inside the fence is a nicely landscaped pool area, a hot tub large enough for a party of eight, a nice size pool house for changing and storing liquid refreshments, and about thirty feet of grass on each side of the pool. The perfect scene for unwinding alone on a hot summer evening, or hosting a pool party, which I seemed to be doing a lot more of lately.
Shedding my towel, I jumped head first into the deep end and started swimming my daily twenty laps. I had swam competitively in high school and college, and although I don't swim competitively any more, I still find it a great way to stay in shape. In high school, twenty laps in the Olympic size pool was nothing. In college, twenty laps twice a day was just a warm up. At the age of thirty-eight, twenty laps in my much smaller forty foot long back yard pool was enough to make me hope and pray my ticker wouldn't give out before I reached the shallow end on my last lap.
Climbing out of the pool, I wrapped a towel around my naked body and plopped down in a lounge chair to let the warm evening breeze dry me off. As I sat there drying and just relaxing, I could not get that misplaced lounge chair out of my mind. Could it have simply been my overactive imagination? Maybe the pool guy had come and cleaned the pool, even though he almost always did that on Fridays.
The more likely answer to my self created mystery, if it really was anything more than just my imagination, was that some of the neighbor boys had scaled the fence while their parents were at work and decided to take a dip in the pool. Having once been a fifteen year old boy myself, it wasn't much of a stretch to think this could actually happen. I didn't really mind the neighborhood kids swimming in my pool, except for the fact that in this day and age, when kids get hurt in swimming pools, there is usually a lawyer chomping at the bit to sue, even if the kid climbed a fence, hot wired the automatic cover, and blatantly ignored the "do not trespass" signs posted on the fence.
The longer I sat there drying off and thinking, the more my mind conjured up worst case scenarios. I've always had a bit of a paranoid streak in me, so the longer I thought about it, the more I was convinced this was a disaster waiting to happen. All because of a slightly misplaced lounge chair. Maybe I should have heeded the divorce Judge's advice when he suggested I might want to consider therapy to take the edge off my neatness compulsion.
Convinced someone had broken into my backyard and convinced there was looming danger if I ignored it, I decided to do a little detective work and solve this mystery, or at least determine if there was even a mystery to solve. All I needed was a video camera and a motion detector like the ones used on those motion sensitive flood lights to rig up a surveillance camera. Simple, right? OK, maybe it wasn't so easy. After several failed attempts to figure out how to use the motion detector to actually start the video camera, I gave up and opted for Plan "B".
Plan "B" was a cheap black and white webcam connected to my computer and set to start recording at ten o'clock in the morning and turn off at four in the afternoon. The problem with the webcam was that the resolution would be too poor to actually tell who the culprit was, but I could at least confirm whether or not there was anything more to this mystery than just my overactive imagination.
The camera was easy to mount in the pool house in a location where it caught most of the pool area within its watchful eye. Excluding climbing the fence, there are only two ways into the pool area. One entrance is via the house itself, the other is via a locked gate along the side of the fence about ten feet away from the house entrance. I was able to angle the camera in a way that I could see both entrances as well as about eighty percent of the pool area. Set to begin recording the following day, all I had to do now was to wait.
Patience may be a virtue, but it's not one of mine. The next day seemed like the longest day of my life. I couldn't wait to get home to check the webcam feed to see if I had caught anything on the camera, or more appropriately, caught "anyone" on the camera. I thought five o'clock would never get there, but it eventually did and I raced home and headed for the pool house to see if my ghost intruder had made a repeat performance.
One of the beauties of the webcam, in addition to being easy to install, was that I could fast forward through the recording and quickly review several hours of footage. If there was no intruder, the picture from the cam would be constant. If there was someone there, even in fast forward I would be able to easily see the change in image.
It took several minutes to load the file. It was almost 30MB of data, but once I got it loaded, the scan went pretty fast. I couldn't believe my eyes. Three hours into the footage, that would have made it about one o'clock in the afternoon, I saw a fast moving object scampering around the pool area. My heart was racing with anticipation as I stopped the media player, backed it up to where the new object entered the scene, and hit the play button to play it in normal speed.
The video was pretty lousy from the webcam, but I could see enough to tell that it was one person. The intruder had long straight hair, presumably female but that was about all the resolution of the camera would allow. She, or possible a long haired he, had entered through the locked gate. That was interesting, somebody obviously had a key.
As I watched more of the feed, it became clearer that the intruder was definitely female. She seemed to make herself right at home. She had brought a bag with a towel and all of the necessities for a day at the pool. She quickly kicked off what must have been a pair of flip flops, then proceeded to strip out of her tee shirt and shorts. Was she naked or just wearing a neutral colored swim suit? Damn it. Now I was wishing I had tried a little harder to figure out how to install that high resolution video camera.
She was naked, I was almost certain. As she walked toward the pool house to open the pool cover, she walked closer to the webcam. The resolution was still too poor to see much detail, but there was no doubt now that my unannounced guest was female, and a pretty well proportioned female at that. I still had no idea who she was.
For the next two hours I watched the video feed like a teenage boy watching his first porno flick. I guess I kept hoping the resolution would suddenly improve, but it never did. Two hours later when she packed her stuff back up and headed for the gate, I had no more of a clue who she was than I did after the first two minutes of the video. One thing I did know though was that I had a raging hard on from watching that video, knowing that she was naked and watching with great anticipation in hopes that I would get a clearer shot. Anticipation truly is a great aphrodisiac!