1 September 1999
All right, here we are at the beginning of September, and those of you who complained about the garish orange boxes can now breathe a sigh of relief. Today is my mom's birthday! Happy birthday, Mom! (She doesn't get her presents from me until Saturday, though.) I don't have much to talk about today - or rather, I have entirely too much to talk about, of which maybe 5% would actually be interesting to my readers. So in the interest of stopping the talk and getting the pictures I took this weekend up as quickly as possible, I'll just offer a few anecdotes from the weekend. Sunday morning, most of us were sitting downstairs chatting when someone upstairs found our gong. (Matt and I have a gong that was a gift from relatives in the Far East.) Since Matt and Braz were the people upstairs, it doesn't seem surprising that the gong was then struck. Repeatedly. After we'd all yelled for Braz to stop it, the two of them came downstairs. Braz was holding a shoe in one hand, and a golf club in the other. Matt, grinning like a maniac, was holding the gong. Once the move was fully in swing, Kris, Karen, and Jen took charge of packing up everything that remained at the apartment. When the first U-Haul load arrived at the house, the boys beseeched Becky and I not to send them back to face the "Mad Packers" - they were apparently wrapping, boxing, and taping anything that wasn't moving, and they were afraid that if they stopped to rest for a moment, then they'd be packed, themselves. Jeff asked Colleen out to dinner on Sunday night, and she told him that she was working Sunday, but that he should call in the evening and leave a message on her answering machine. He did so. Around 7, just as Jeff was getting irritable that she hadn't called back and the rest of us were advising him to go pick up a bunch of flowers and show up on her doorstep, she arrived. She came in and flopped, completely exhausted, onto our couch. While she complained about her day at work, Jeff slipped quietly out and drove off. The rest of us kept her distracted. Finally, after a bit of rest and a Mountain Dew to wake her up, she sat up and looked around. "Where's Jeff?" She looked out the window. "His car's not out there! Did he go out to get himself food?!? I just needed to rest a little!" Just as she was working herself up into a royal fit, Jeff returned... With a bouquet of flowers. Monday night, Matt and I went to Lowe's to get some things. One of the things we needed was an extension for our washing machine's drain hose. We went to the appliances department and talked to someone who admitted to knowing nothing about drain hoses. He led us to another person, who told us with great authority that no such thing as an extendor kit existed, and that we'd have to... I have no idea what he suggested we do, because he started speaking in tongues, and Matt and I were both too tired to remember any of the foreign words. I went back Tuesday morning and talked to a person in the section of the store dealing with pipes and hoses, rather than appliances, and he helped me find a hose that I suspect is meant to be the primary hose, but which fit the end of the hose we've already got. Matt and I put some laundry in the washer, added soap, set the settings, and pulled the knob... Nothing. We looked at each other. I leaned over and checked the plugs. I pushed the knob back in and frowned, wondering what the problem could be. Matt said, "Do we need to turn on the water?" It hadn't occurred to me that they would have hooked everything up and left the water off. Matt got a flashlight so we could read the pipe valves, and sure enough, they were off. I turned them on, pulled the knob, and whoosh! the washer started, just like it was supposed to. We hovered over the washer for a while like nervous parents with a new baby, making sure it wouldn't leak, but when it finally went through the first drain cycle, no water leaked from the place where the hoses were joined, and it definitely sounded like the water was running down pipes and not just into the wall. Which is good. I wasn't looking foward to coming to work today in my pajamas.