On Thanksgiving, we were in luck; the weather was pleasant. We left the sliding glass door stuck in the open position. With 3 dogs at our house, plus another one when Grandma comes, we open and close that door a lot! And it's too heavy for me to lift, so I have to keep calling Ron or Josh to do it. That got old for them, so they left it open for the day. That just meant I had to battle flies in the kitchen while I fixed Thanksgiving dinner. So Josh and Alyssa did Round One of Thanksgiving with his parents, then Ron went to pick up Katie at the airport. The kids picked up Grandma on their way back to our house for Round 2, and then Scott and Pam arrived. Michael joined us on Skype and we all met everyone in his new host family. Afterwards, Katie's boyfriend came to pick Katie up for a little bit, Pam & Scott left, I took Grandma home, and Ron started the dishes. Lots of coordinating that day.
So the repair man DID come the next day for the hot tub. The motor had gotten wet and a bunch of parts had to be replaced. $650 worth! Then the guy came to measure the door. Estimate: door plus labor $1200. Cha-Ching! That went quickly! Ron had been planning to sell Katie's car, so it seemed like a good day to do that! He cleaned it out and took it up to CarMax. Her little Sunfire - that had been Michael's when we first moved here - was traded in for $3000. That's twice what Ron had expected! I think we only paid about $4000. She had had several wrecks in it (the girl was never a great driver!), the speedometer didn't work and the interior was pretty shabby. So when they gave Ron the check, he called me to pick him up, "Hurry, before they change their mind or say that it was the price for someone ELSE's car! hahaha"So that covered the expenses for the larger items. And the front of our house looks less like a car dealership.
Even though I wasn't going to go shopping on Black Friday, I realized that Katie needed some winter clothes for NYC. I may not have mentioned this, but evidently, I gave away all of her winter clothes to Goodwill last September. She had 2 bags - one for Goodwill and one to be sent to her later. I was really procrastinating about moving her and Michael's things. It just seemed like too much was happening too fast when they both left within a week of each other. If you missed what that was like, look at Hurricanes on Multiple Fronts. So within a couple of days of their leaving, Ron was redoing the upstairs floor. Katie's furniture came out to put new flooring in. Bastrop's fire victim families needed replacement furniture, and Katie wouldn't really need the bedroom set again. Josh was going to move in at the end of his lease so he'd be bringing his own bed, a much better one for the room. So Ron and Josh were pushing for me to make decisions about the bags of stuff....what's trash? what's goodwill? what's storage? In the commotion, the "what's going to be sent to Katie later bag, was whisked away. The day after Thanksgiving, I went out to storage to see if *maybe* it had been socked away in there somewhere. Nope. Our little displaced Texan faced a New York winter with no cold weather clothes. So we went shopping. And Alyssa, who never misses a sale, joined us. Everyone got new winter clothes.
I know, this is a somewhat mundane story.
But it just seems like...
...it's always something!
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