Took a day off from work today, first one since... February, at least, and the 3rd for the year so far. Not like I haven't worked enough weekends and evenings to accumulate another week or two of vacation, but that's just silly talk. Foolish capitalist. I looked at email this afternoon and almost without thinking went and gorged myself. That's what we call a superhealthy stress relief mechanism, eh?

But since I was home and I'm starting to try to chip away at the things I've neglected. I started on it a bit yesterday, pulled weeds and swept the back patio, got the sprinkler system reconfigured and running on a scheduled timer again. Today I tackled the maggot jar (augh don't ask) and cleaned the koi pond again. I'm finally looking into replumbing the parts of it that are screwed; mainly the waterfall feature. Soon, soon.

And then the giant scary waterworks to end all waterworks, I opened the hot tub again to try to find this new leak. I found one; you know those little dials on the top that let you adjust how much air is in the jet stream? Well, one of them was partly unscrewed (I didn't even know they screwed in!) so I took it apart, figured out how it worked, and put it back on the with the ring resealed. Magically, it stopped leaking.

But water was still dripping a little bit so I dried it off and started it up again. Now, for those who were paying attention, you'll see that part #7 indicated here is rather familiar. (omg, that was 2006?)

Well, I suppose it's not entirely obvious but they are, and the one on the hot tub is leaking. So I reconfigured the DIP switches on the control panel (!! I'm serious !!) to make the controller think that the motor could only handle the low setting, at which speed it only dripped a bit. At least this way I can leave it running the normal nightly ozone cycle until the replacement pump component arrives in the mail.

The koi are happy. They danced around quite a bit and seemed pleased with the slightly-cleaner water. I just ran to the store and bought them some new food and they were all over it. Inexplicably, though, they're even bigger than before. I figured with the cold temperatures they'd at least stop growing, but nope. Enormous jibblies ftw. In fact, I can barely tell Trogdor and his offspring apart anymore. They're both huge.

I don't suppose anybody in the greater Phoenix area would care for some koi? I could really stand to get rid of 4 of them. Or come over, we'll have an Unkempt Movie Lawn and a fish fry. :9