Yesterday was an exhausting day all the way around. It actually started on Friday, with the threat of winter weather that sent everyone into a tizzie. The 6 inches of snow we ended up with didn’t match the 12 to 18 they were threatening, but it was definitely enough to catch the attention of these southern folks. It was the last day of school for the winter holiday for most kids, and it ended earlier than expected on most accounts in western North Carolina.
We had events planned, though, that were not mindful of the weather and could not be postponed. When our friend went back to Colombia in early November, we decided this was the perfect time to update and clean the apartment. It hadn’t been painted in almost 10 years through a variety of tenants and needed a bit of sprucing up. Some of the furniture simply didn’t work very well, there was too much of it, and it just needed to be freshened up.
We started by emptying out the apartment one Saturday a few weeks ago, arranging to get the floors sanded and refinished (they were overlooked during the first renovation), lining up painters and eventually getting a roofer to tackle the leak that’s been plaguing us for months.
We were supposed to have until January 6 to get all this done, but our friend’s visit back to Colombia didn’t go exactly as planned and he had us change his ticket to bring him home early – on December 19, to be exact.
Two weeks is a long time in remodeling talk. Especially if the deadline moves backwards by that amount. We were going along pretty well, except the painters couldn’t get back down the mountain on Friday in time to finish. No fault of theirs, the normally 45 minute trip from Blowing Rock took them over 6 hours. A person can only do what they can do.
Saturday was also complicated by the fact that our youngest son was scheduled to have his knee operated on at 6:30 on Saturday morning. He blew it out during the second Junior High JV football game this season.
So we were loaded up in the snow at 5 in the morning, travelling to the kid’s house to pick him up along with his mom and grandmother, and then head off to the hospital.
The short version of that story is that things went great. Damage wasn’t as bad as originally anticipated, so he’ll have a 4 week recovery instead of a 7 month one. Football appears to be on for next season, although it’ll be wearing a brace to prevent similar twisting in the futurre.
While he was in surgery, the painters called and said they couldn’t get out of their neighborhood, but if I’d bring the 4 wheel drive jeep (kept for just such an occasion), they’d come and work toward finishing up. Since I was expendable, I ventured out on the roads.
Which, incidentally, weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been since it always had hovered right at freezing and there wasn’t a lot of ice prior to the snow. By midday, most of the roads were cleared.
We were out of the hospital with one very happy young man (at that time mostly due to the anesthesia, since he wouldn’t remember most of what he’d been told) and fielding telephone calls as our friend journeyed back from Colombia.
From our perspective, things went without a hitch. Customs wasn’t a problem, his paperwork was blissfully correct and his flight was one of the few that wasn’t delayed or cancelled. He landed within 10 minutes of the scheduled time and by 7:30 we’d collected him at the Charlotte airport and were on our way home, hearing about his adventures in Colombia.
All families are dysfunctional. Some just do it with an accent. We’re all alike, though.
I might not have been quite so excited about arriving home to find that my house had been emptied, all my stuff moved around and some of my furniture replaced. He is, however, a very forgiving fellow and was thrilled with the upgrades, even though it meant he was in our guest room for the night and his house was in disarray. His exhaustion (since he’d been up since before 4 in the morning) turned to excitement as he started deciding how best to add to the renovations.
Overall, it was a great day. The snow is mostly gone and no more is forecast until Christmas Eve.
It was one of the best early Christmas presents we could have received.
1 comment:
Great!
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