So I love looking for inexpensive bargains, especially to spruce up the backyard.  Mostly I find things at the thrift store that are weather-resistant that I can hang up or display from my kitchen nook to make me feel happy when I see them, and also to entertain my niece and nephew when they come around.  At Big Lots I found these really cute floating flowers for a buck each, so I bought a half dozen.  Within the first few minutes, Bobby asked me where the red one had gone, and I wasn’t sure if it had been one that we put back or not.  We then noticed a bunch of the other ones start to fall apart as the glue that adhered the lily pads to the flowers and leaves were weakened by the water and chemicals, so it didn’t seem to work all that well.  Added to this mixture was my probably not-so-brilliant idea of putting bath OILS in the hot tub. They had a nice vanilla cupcake scent, but the side effect was a virtual bubble bath that went out of control when we turned on the jets, even though this was decidedly not a bubble-bath product.

So after having replaced the most expensive part of the hot tub in recent months ($500 not including labor!), I called the repair guy again.  He doesn’t give free estimates, but I had to bit the bullet.  I was terrified that the similar symptoms of “low flow” (which is LF on the display) meant I was in big trouble, and that perhaps something had burned out and wasn’t working correctly because the displacement of water when a few big people leave the hot tub can cause the water level to drop dramatically.  That may have contributed to the problem the last time, although the hot tub was manufactured seven years ago (even if five of those years it sat in a warehouse).

Fortunately the hot tub repairman advised us never to use those damn dollar flowers anymore, because that damn red flower that disappeared almost instantly had brought our hot tub to a screeching halt for weeks.  Lesson learned!

We were also advised that bath oils are not the same as hot tub scents, so I won’t try to go cheap on that again, either!