When I first moved out to my thirty-hundredths of an acre, house, and no mule in North Dallas, it was a new experience for me -- new, in the context that it was the first time I had ever lived in a preowned home when I was old enough to remember it. This stems from the fact that the NDT Dad, having grown up in a ranch house that could euphemistically be described as "vintage", has an aversion that verges on paranoia towards any form of roof over his head that is older than he is -- which meant we never lived in anything other than a new house. As a result, though, I had never before had the experience of, "Why the hell did they do that?" that comes, not during the inspection, when the house could be on fire and you would be rationalizing it as "excellent central heat", but after a few months of living in it, when the novelty of every single lock in the house requiring a different key wears off.
One of the things that falls into this category is my hot tub. The previous owner of the house was a nurse who spent long hours working away from her husband, then plied him with extravagant and expensive treats on her return home; this is why my house, a bare shade over one thousand square feet in size, has a spa that could double as a dry dock for the Nimitz.
When I first toured the house, the only thing I could think of upon seeing it was how many fun nights I was going to have with that thing -- parties with other bears and cubs, long soaks after workouts, a lot of warm water-sodomy under the stars. What I didn't contemplate were nights like this one, where I spent an hour scrubbing off the sides....after replacing the filter.....after discovering, upon my weekend out of town, that the breaker had tripped in my absence, rendering 650 gallons of water held under a cover at ninety degrees, uncirculated and un-chemicaled, the color, consistency, and odoriferousness of bacterial growth medium.
At least I got the being naked in the backyard part right.
No comments:
Post a Comment