May 25 2013
Hot Tub Time Machine
Faithful readers know that the decaying and useless hot tub has been a bête noire for me since I first moved into my little house in the pygmy woods nearly four years ago. The rest of the garden looks pretty nice after years of work, but then you have this eyesore in the middle:
The boys deemed it unfixable, which is saying something, and showed me the somewhat alarming Jamesification that heated the water (open gas flame inside a wooden structure, anyone?). I talked to Mark about it before he left for his year on the East Coast, but there were a lot more pressing problems to deal with. But one day I came home and found that the hot tub had (mostly) been removed.
The motor is still left, since Mark’s envoy wasn’t sure if it was hard wired or otherwise too dangerous to yank out. Someone is supposed to come and look at it sometime and take it away, at which point I will put the glass table with its umbrella and chairs there. Hopefully I can convince the long-suffering Rob to get rid of the post and I can get rid of the path to nowhere. I might have get a little more gravel, but on the whole, it’s less of a mess:
You can tell the cats are thinking, “Where’s our couch?” and “I’m pretty sure there used to be something here to jump onto.” Here you can see Clyde visibly wondering what the hell:
Surprisingly, they are able to jump to the ground or into one of the chairs from the (slippery) glass rooflet on the back porch.
Cats are amazing.
In other hot tub news, my brother went all the way to Willits to acquire a second hand and reasonably-priced Japanese wood-fired hot tub called a Chofu. Like tofu, only not gross. Since space is at a premium in Japan, the unit which holds the logs is very small, but well insulated and efficient. The tub is big enough to hold four people and overlooks the palatial garden. As you can imagine, it’s a favored place to hang out and relax after hours of working on said garden.