Why must we choose between our luxuries?

I get very lazy about maintaining the hot tub in the winter. I hate winter and avoid going outside as much as possible. Last week, Mark decided to drain it and clean it out, for the first time. I've done it all the other times it needed doing. I told him exactly what to do, and I don't know if something weird just happened or if he did something weird, but after he filled it a few days later and turned it back on, it just quit working. It wouldn't heat up and was making an awful sound.

But before we noticed it wasn't working, we did notice the satellite TV wasn't working. As soon as the hot tub was fired back up, the satellite went bye-bye. Mark finally made this connection after spending quite some time on the phone with the satellite people. During this conversation, they had him reset the receiver completely. I'll get back to this.

After he hung up, he started to wonder if it was related to the hot tub having been turned back on that day. They had both run simultaneously all this time, but who knows. He then discovered near the breaker box a plug that kept popping out the reset button. When he pressed the button, the satellite would come on for 30 seconds and then the button would pop back out. Eventually we gave up and went to bed, because without TV, what is there to do? (Well, there's knitting and reading and other things, but when you are really tired, those aren't options.)

The next day the TV started working, but I had to turn off the hot tub, which by now hadn't warmed up at all and was making an awful sound. Initially, I wondered who the a-hole neighbor was using such an annoying sounding machine. Then I realized it was us.

Back to the reset problem. Our entire recording to-do list was deleted. When we went back to reset them, it wouldn't let us set several of the shows. You can choose one-time recording or series recording. For instance, American Idol on Wednesdays let us record series, but it didn't pick up Tuesday's like it should. So we tried to set that one too, but it won't let us. It did this with about half of our favorite shows. It said that last night's Idol was set to record, but then it didn't record it.

Oh, and yesterday I waited around all day for the hot tub guy and he never showed up. So now, no TV shows, no hot tub. Life SUCKS.

p.s. hot tub guy just arrived. Life could start to improve!