But I digress....The repair wasn't an easy job mainly because the water heater is pretty difficult to get at. I have seen some pretty stupid decisions made by home builders, but they outdid themselves with this house....the hot water heater is in the attic!! The attic is accessible only by one of those fold down ceiling ladder thingies. How insane is that??? Seriously, who puts a hot water heater in an inaccessible attic??? I have no idea how they even got the dang thing up there! They must have put the heater in when the house was nothing more than studs and then built the rest of the house around it!! God help us if we ever have to replace it. I think we'd have to tear down a ceiling in order to get the old one out and put the new one in!!
Well anyway, he got it done and I came back home and we proceeded to have a quiet little evening at home. We thought.
About 9:15 pm, Ratchlet called. Nothing unusual in that. So I answered and she said, "Hi! Whatcha doing?" That seemed a little bit odd, for that time of night. "Not much," I answered, "just toodling around on the computer. Why?"
"Weeeelllllll," she said, with a bit of a giggle in her voice, "we are up at IKEA and we have a little problem." [I could hear M-t-G laughing in the background and saying, "we need back-up!"]
She said they were able to get their purchases (a couple of large bookcases and a cabinet) into their car.....but there was no place left for her and M-t-G to sit. Could we, maybe, please, come to get them so that T.A. could drive the "stuff" home???
Well, of course we could! So we took a few minutes to make ourselves presentable again and off we went to "take a little trip".
When we got there, we found that they were not the only ones having transportation problems! There were two woman (probably mother and daughter) who had this big ole Budget rent-a-truck, but the ramp on the truck was unusuable, so they couldn't get their purchases in the truck. And, boy, did they have purchases!! I was told they had 2 "new" kitchens and something else large scale. If you are familar with IKEA, you know that much of their stuff is modular, disassembled, and do-it-yourself, so these women must have had over 50 boxes holding all the different pieces. Now I'm not talking shoe boxes. Nuh-uh! They had six of IKEA's flatbed carts loaded up with stuff. There were a couple of boxes that could have used a few burly men to lift!! Those suckers were heavy. The other boxes were large scale, and awkward, and not quite as heavy, but heavy enough!
T.A., Ratchlet and M-t-G were already helping when we got there, so the Big Guy proceeded to help too. Now even with four of them (I didn't do much of anything) and the two women, it still took about 40 minutes to get everything they bought into the truck!!! If my family hadn't helped, I don't know what those women would have done! The store was already closed and there was no one else around.
So they finally got it all into the truck, we said our good-byes and were on our way. M-t-G and Ratchlet came with us and we drove them to their house. Then, T.A. and the Big Guy unloaded their stuff (not exactly light weight either!!) It was waaaay past M-t-G's bedtime and they were all pretty worn out, so we didn't stay very long. By this time it was about 11:15 or so.
The Big Guy and I were a bit peckish so we stopped at an IHOP on the way and had something to eat, before we completed the rest of the trip back to our house. We got home at about 12:45 a.m.
Now that little junket took over 3 hours and put 70 miles on my car!! 70 miles! Why? How?? Because we live at the very NORTHWESTERN-most tip of Austin. The IKEA store is at the very NORTHEASTERN-most suburb of Austin. R, T, & M live at the very SOUTHWESTERN-most tip of Austin. Luckily about 75% of the driving was on the highway. I'm not complaining, you understand, it was what you do when your family needs help. We'd do a lot more than "take a little trip" to help our daughter when she needs it! We really didn't mind at all.
Nevertheless, it does explain how I managed to put close to 55,000 miles on my not quite 3 1/2 year old car!! Austin is fairly small-sized city, but it sure ain't a small town!! After all, you can "take a little trip" and never even leave town!!
I love it! I guess we never get to the point where we won't just drop everything and help our kids. We've had some strange calls, too. The best one was when the Stanford Credit Union failed to post one of Jenni's car payments and they sent thugs out to repossess the car! Jeff called us, we had a stealth mission to pick her up at the San Jose theater where she was working and squirrel her home without her car. Then we had to take her back the next day to pick it up after she got the SCU situation resolved!
ReplyDeleteIt's one of the joys of living close to your kids. And I wouldn't trade it for anything.