For the record, when our pool was done, while I was waiting for Ben's kit, I used a Walmart kit. It was broken somehow and my CH always read 0. So I thought I had no calcium, and kept dumping in calcium. Now that I have Ben's kit, I test around 500ppm calcium (CH) but my pool is crystal clear thanks to the other numbers being nearly perfect (again, thanks to Ben's kit). So it IS possible to have clear water with high CH. I'll probably get some scale somewhere in the future but I'm slowly letting the CH come back down through splashout.

Question for all: Does evaporation (and requisite refilling) lower CH? It would seem that it would not lower it, since the CH would not evaporate with the water.