Why am I barely able to string sentences together, you ask? I'll tell you why. Well, I'll try to, but it might not be elegant speech. Don't get catty. Sometimes it is elegant. It won't be now.
When I got this hot tub last spring, I was told to change out the water completely every six months. I missed my mark, by a lot. It should have been done somewhere around November or December. It's now June. We've done partial water changes often. It's a really convenient source of warm water for dog baths, and Murray gets a lot of baths, what with dragging his tail through stinky stuff so often. But rarely did we extract more than a quarter of the water at a time. With chemo looming in the near future, I will need a non-drug way to calm and soothe myself, and I will need a meticulously sanitary environment (which I almost never have, with a Park full of animals and a park ranger who is chronically ill.) Today, we did the first 100% full water change. Or rather, he started it and I finished it.
I had bought a bottle of cleaner a month ago to scour out the jet pipes, thinking this would happen sooner than it did. I've been dying to know how dirty the guts of the hot tub are. It was almost disappointing today, to find that there was just a little scummy residue. I was told it would be well and truly gross. It wasn't. But it was a lot of scale and people goo (the corollary to soap scum), and I had to wash it all out. The Mr poured the bottle of cleaner in and ran the jets for an hour, as instructed. It was mesmerizing to see the cloud of foam it made, and I even took a video of it for a few seconds, to amuse myself. He then set a hose to siphon and drain it all the way out to the alley, to avoid making our yard muddy. (Joke was on him--it rained to beat the band this evening. It's like a swamp out there now.) Once the water was half gone, I started pushing down the scale with a magic eraser, hoping that it would get carried out to the alley.
By the time there was only an inch or two left, I stopped the siphon, and climbed in with a bucket of vinegar-soap water and my magic eraser, and I covered every single bit of the interior and the rim of the tub. I followed it with a plain water rinse with a wash cloth. I bailed out the last remnants of water a cup at a time, until the bottom was completely dry. I had to work hard to get the sand off the bottom. But it's now pristine. I am going to re-instate my Draconian rules about rinsing feet before we get into it, so that I don't have to do this again, and I think tomorrow I'm going to go to Target and get a collection of the cheapest flip-flops they have, as tub shoes for us and our guests to get from the house to the spa. The only thing I can't control is that Elsa likes to stand on the stairs and stare at us with big puppy dog eyes, and her feet are not super clean. I'll just have to wash the stairs a lot, which won't be fun while I'm bone tired from treatment.
I failed to get a picture of it filled back up with pure, clean, blue water. I got plenty of it murky and foamy. Maybe tomorrow, once I've put the proper chemicals back in it, I'll do a follow up.
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