Several, several years ago while visiting with my cousin, I got a real treat.  It was a cold and drizzly winter’s day, about 40 degrees (that’s cold around here) and we were sitting around at his girlfriend’s house, when he asked if I wanted to see his latest project.  Considering he’s built every kind of hot rod you can imagine, from a monster Monte Carlo to a blown Chevy pick-up, I would have been crazy to say I wasn’t interested.  So he got up and motioned me toward the back door.  Now I had been at this house before and I knew that the back door went out into the yard and there wasn’t a shop or anything there the last time, so I imagined it must have been a work in progress, something the weather wouldn’t bother.
    When he opened the door, I was surprised to see a set of wooden steps...going up.  The house was built on a concrete slab in an extremely flat area.  It was immediately obvious that there, sitting about three feet from the house was a deck...a very large deck.  We walked up the steps and out on to the deck.  We were about four feet off the ground and could see clear across the neighborhood.  It wasn’t a fancy multi-level deck, but it was pretty nice just the same.  It was simple, but very well built.  I motioned toward a large cylinder sitting over in the corner of the deck.
    “What’s that?” I asked.
    “That’s my hot tub!” my cousin proudly announced.
    We walked over to a large, galvanized feeding trough about eight feet in diameter.  The tub sides were bare corrugated steel and there were two sheets of old plywood covering the top.  Toward the back of the “hot tub” was an electric pump unit.  He flicked a switch and the pump started buzzing and you could hear the gurgle of water inside the tank.  He slid one of the sheets of plywood back about a foot and you could see the current in the dingy water starting to moving.

    “OH, so you...made...this?”  I asked.
    “Aw, yeah.  I built all of this.”  Once again he was beaming with accomplishment.
    As we stood there a minute, the swirling water picked up speed and started to slowly rotate around the tank.  You could see some thick white bubbles forming in the eddy.     “Yeah, man...got a heater on it and everything!”
    About that time an extremely large and drowned rat came drifting out from under the darkness of the plywood.  I just stood and stared.
    Without missing a beat and in a calm and matter of fact voice, my cousin said, “Yeah, I’ve got to get that old rat out of there.”

    I guess that could have happened to anybody, though.