Mission Accomplished

Staying up late into the night last night, the rooms were taped, the ceilings in all the remaining rooms were painted (popcorn ceilings should be a sin), and the two children's bedrooms each got a coat of primer.

Rising early, my husband helped me get the finish coats on the two rooms before I ran off to swim lessons and he ran off to a meeting (Son Three passed Level 5: woo-hah! and Daughter One and Only jumped off the three-meter board and swam back to the wall all by herself for the first time!).

After Karate and lunch, we peeled the tape, moved furniture back (but didn't unbox any books or toys... in anticipation of the carpet's arrival next week), and lugged four nasty ancient twin-size mattresses to the dump. Then to Sam's, where four nice new Serta mattresses fit neatly into the back of the pick-up truck.

While in the checkout line, my husband rang my cell: Dad's broke down in Julesburg (this after breaking down in Des Moines, Lincoln, and North Platte already), and is giving up... can we come out and get him? Oh, and please bring the van, because all he has in the world is in the trailer (on which the wheels have broken off of the axles)? We decide to wait until I get back with the mattresses before doing anything just yet (this is experience talking).

By the time I'm home again, Dad's called again... the tow-truck driver also has a storage facility, and he'll be happy to store the stuff. So he'll be on his way again to our house.

Good. Spread mattresses around the bedrooms, throw on sheets, blankets, pillows... vacuum floors, tidy up where all the work from the kitchen has been going on (YES! that is one thing that is going GREAT! It looks be-yoo-ti-ful!), try to scrub paint out of the bath tub... and here I am. We're ready for Grandpa to come.

(It looks like it might be an extended stay... the poor - stubborn, ill, dying - fellow has been trying to move back to Alaska for the last 5 years, and every time he saves up enough money to tote all his ... stuff... he gets on the road, gets about this far, and breaks down. He ends up staying with us for a while, then goes back to wherever it was he came from, to start all over again. So, I think we're at the "staying with us for a while" point in the cycle. We shall see.)

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