Got up early this morning to get my "hurr did" which I have had to put off for over two weeks. Had my handy $9.99 coupon and with a 50% tip still spent under twenty bucks! You gotta love a low maintenance cut.
Came home to get ready for the big move!! My former neighbors across the street were giving us the refrigerator out of their old house and it was a Cadillac! Tim hired the firm of "Three Saps and a Hand Truck" also known as my next door neighbor bringing hand trucks , Tim and his (now former) best friend. My kitchen is on the ground floor right off the garage. I told them I thought it best if they just left the junk in the old fridge and wheeled it out into the garage, plugged it back in and waited til we had the new one in to transfer the contents. It's only fifteen feet from where the old fridge sat to the garage.
I told Massey as soon as Tim's (former) best friend got there "Let's go the the store for garbage bags, I don't wanna be here for this."
Maybe I should have stayed.
Seems that while we were gone they discovered our old refrigerator wouldn't fit through the kitchen door out to the garage and by the time we got back they had dragged the old carcass of a fridge across the kitchen and through my dining room, bumped up the four steps into my living room and now had my front door taken off the hinges trying to get it out the front door...leaving behind a trail of water, dirt and a couple of broken pickle jars. You have to be specific with men. I should have said "If it won't fit through the kitchen door, unload it." You know what... At least it was getting moved and it isn't like I am OCD about my house. As they started trying to shove it out the front door, Tim looked down and said "Looks like we need to buy some more eggs."
They finally got the old fridge out the door, down the five steps on the front porch and around the house into the garage and Massey and I plugged it back in.
Bringing the new Cadillac in wasn't much easier except now we knew we had to bring it in the same way the old one went out. While they were hauling it up the front steps I mopped up the water and dirt on the kitchen floor with Mr. Clean and some old beach towels. My next door neighbor's son had to leave to go to work so I filled in for him as we maneuvered the Caddy through the front door (which was still off the hinges laying in the living room floor letting the 89 degrees outside flood into my hovel of a house.)
It felt like lifting a house but I hung in there. Into the living room we went. Back down the four steps to the dining room we bumped. Hit a snag when we hit the kitchen doorway. We had to take the doors off the refrigerator to fit it through the tight doorway and ninety degree turn. My kitchen was a wreck, my carpets were worse but after a hour and a half I had me a new refrigerator that almost seemed to be smiling at me in his little corner of my kitchen.
It took me two hours to clean my kitchen floor but I have never been happier to do it. I got through just in time to iron a work shirt and jump in the shower for work. Massey had to work tonight and so did Zach. We left for the Po key in time to stop at Chic Fil A for some free sandwiches with cards another one of my wonderful friends sends me in the mail several times a year. Zach chowed down on the way into work.
Work was an even bigger nightmare. Busy doesn't even begin to describe it but it all worked out in the end to my advantage. Massey was working at the host stand with two girls she loves to work with. One woman has worked there quite a while...I call her Aibileen. She is big and black and one of the funniest sweetest women I have ever met. She is kind, she is smart and she is important (to me as a friend.) She has taught Massey a lot about being African American, from the south and not being rich. Massey one time asked her why black people called their houses "Where they stay?" My friend simply said "Because it's just temporary." The other girl working with them at the host stand tonight was a Latino girl a couple of years older than Massey. She is one of the hardest working teens I have ever met. When she can't get host shifts she picks up shifts washing dishes in the kitchen...which seems just above shoveling dog crap from a pack of fifty dogs with diarrhea in a tiny hot room to us middle class white people...but she does it with a smile on her sweet face. Massey was asking Miriam about Cinco de Mayo (which is actually a made up holiday for bars to sell more booze) when my fabulous friend Aibileen chimed in "Girl...black people get a month, let'em have a day."
After I got off work... Massey and I were driving home and she told me that story. I bet I laughed for five minutes.
Massey is learning a lot about reality working with me...sometimes too much but at least she's getting paid for it!
I came home to a sparkling clean kitchen floor and a huge new refrigerator that is absolutely hands down the nicest appliance I have ever owned. Paying It Forward...a hugely under rated idea and one that could change the entire world. I asked Massey if she had ever seen the movie "Pay It Forward" and was shocked to learn when I watched it with my younger son she was too young to watch it with us.
Guess what movie Massey and I will be watching tomorrow night when I get home from my day shift?
Til next time...COTTON
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