It’s absolutely gorgeous outside today, and some families from the ward got together at a park after church for the afternoon. It was nice to sit around and talk in the nice weather. Kyle tried to fly our kite, but it just wasn’t windy enough. We proclaimed it a lazy turtle. Nothing really exciting happened, but it was a very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon/early evening.
I know…we’re lame and haven’t blogged in a while. This is all I’ve got for you:
It has recently been brought to my attention (no thanks to CNN’s news feed!) that I’m going to have to get a new birth certificate. Apparently, if you need to commit identity fraud, you just buy a Puerto Rican birth certificate floating around the black market, for there are tons. To solve this problem, all the current ones are being nullified as of July 1. New ones (supposedly with anti-fraud measures built in) can be requested starting then.
How lame is that? I’m sure it’ll be a breeze. I’m sure the Puerto Rican bureaucracy is totally capable of re-issuing birth certificates for everybody in a timely and non-irritating fashion. Thanks again, Parents, for having me in that wonderful territory. (Why did you go there, anyway? Probably just for stuff like this. You got to have all the fun of living in sunny paradise (which I don’t even remember), and I get the paperwork mess. Rude.) This will make the second time my birth certificate has caused me grief. SO FAR.
I only heard about this because Kyle’s mom read about it in her newspaper. Neither Kyle nor I saw it in our feeds of national news. So I could easily not have found out that my birth certificate was invalid until I applied for a passport or something. Which would have been even more awesome. They probably would have looked at me and said it was for sure one of the fakes still hanging around.
We started off Saturday by going to the Primary Easter Egg Hunt at the ward building. Mostly, we hung around and watched, and then helped point out ones the kids couldn’t find. After that, we stayed because Kyle had signed us up to help clean the church. This is where the day started to get long and tiring (and I’ll admit that since I’d cleaned the apartment on Friday, I was tired of cleaning before we even started). We cleaned for about an hour and a half and then came home for some much-needed lunch. When we did, we discovered that Kyle had a voicemail from the furniture store: our nightstands were in! Huzzay! (Okay, I just looked, and it seems that we never blogged about our nightstands. But we spent an epic trip at a furniture store in mid-Feb. picking out nightstands, trying to find ones we liked that would match our bed. But we were told they would take 6 weeks to arrive, so here we are.)
All we had to do now was find a truck to transport the furniture in, right? (We had opted out of having it delivered, as the store is in San Leandro, half an hour away and that tends to make delivery ridiculously expensive.) We’d planned on just going to Home Depot and renting a truck ($20 for 75 minutes) like we’d done previously, no big deal. So we told the store we’d be down, though it may take a couple hours (just to be safe), had some lunch, and took off for Home Depot. It was then 1:00 p.m. My only explanation for what ensued is that the weather out here is starting to get really nice, and everybody and their dog wants to take advantage of that (and for a lot of people, that means doing outdoorsy projects that require big trucks? I dunno). Home Depot’s truck is unavailable until Wednesday or Thursday. Lowe’s does the same deal, but their truck was being used for a delivery (and no, they don’t know when it’ll be back or even where it’s being taken to. (Really? No managers keeping track of that? That seems odd, especially when they could be making additional money by renting the truck out, but whatever.) And no, they couldn’t take our name or call us (of course, a store that doesn’t keep track of their own property or personnel wouldn’t do anything as service-oriented or sophisticated as a reservation), but we could call them back later and see if the truck was back. So we came back home. FAIL.
Kyle then started to look around online and make phone calls, and the results were extremely frustrating. Most moving companies will rent you a truck a day at a time, for something like $50 plus mileage. U-Haul will rent a truck or a van for $20 (I think) plus mileage, which would have made it around $60. The HD and Lowe’s in Dublin had both rented out their trucks. The Lowe’s in Pleasanton had rented out its truck, but the HD there had its truck available. So we hurried over. Of course, in the ten minutes it took us to get there, somebody else had showed up and rented it. By this point, it was a little after 3:00, and Kyle knew that the truck from Pleasanton’s Lowe’s was due back at 3:45, so we decided to camp out there and wait for it to come back. By 4:15, we were sitting on the floor in front of the Customer Service desk (out of the way) and all the employees at that desk knew what we were waiting for. (They were pretty nice about it.) We were still just worried that we would miss it and it would get rented out to somebody else while we weren’t looking. Finally, at 4:30, the guy returned the truck and we got on our way. It only took 3.5 very frustrating hours.
I guess the good part is that Kyle was so tired by this point that he couldn’t get all worked up about having to maneuver the big truck on the highway. He handled it much more calmly than last time. 😀 Anyway, we got the nightstands and brought them home. Of course, we got stuck in the evening highway traffic we’d been hoping to avoid by doing all this in the early afternoon, but whatever. We were glad just to get back home again. And now, pictures!
So, here they are, all wrapped up. Well, mostly wrapped up.
And now, unwrapped (I’m just wiping out one of the drawers):
Aren’t they pretty? I love the color. They match the bed really well (it’s not perfect, but it’s dang close) and I have always enjoyed wood with reddish hues. So warm and comforting. So then we got to put them back in the bedroom and load them up, which was great. I like to have a lot of stuff within reach of my bed (y’know, in case I need it (yes, it’s the pack-rat tendency!)), so I’ve just had a huge pile of stuff on my side of the bed. It’s all sensible stuff, though–water, music, books, scriptures, drugs, etc. Anyway, here are my and then Kyle’s nightstands all loaded up. (‘Cuz I know you care!)
I don’t know if you noticed, but the floor lamp is on Kyle’s side of the bed. Since that’s the only light in the room, we’re both very excited for me to finally have a place for a lamp, given my tendency to stay up reading. Yay! And lastly, the overall effect:
I swear, it’s starting to look like a real bedroom in there! Y’know, for grownups!
I hate getting out and unfolding a blanket and getting all snuggled into it, only to find a HUGE spider on the floor. ‘Cuz you know it came from the blanket. Not only do you have to kill the spider, you have to shake out the entire blanket for several minutes before you can be sure there aren’t any more in there. Blergh.
Also, I’m never doing a Google image search for “spider” again. I just wanted a cute cartoony spider to put down here. Now there are horrible spider bite pics in my head! And even worse spiders than the one I killed (which was really quite large and nasty looking). Bad idea.
Forecasted highs for the next 3 days: 69°, 70°, and 68°. Isn’t it February? Where’s my winter???
[pout]