Happy New Year…. sort of

Posted on | January 2, 2012 | 2 Comments

On New Year’s Day 2012 I found myself doing two unexpected things. The first was pushing a stolen supermarket trolley up and down a street in Phoenix. The second was driving a 10-foot truck down the Highway to Tucson.

You may surmise that Hubby and I suddenly found ourselves homeless, and that I was recruited as the runaway driver in a theft of some very heavy goods.

What really happened takes a bit of backtracking. There were these ceiling fans, you see. I ordered them new on LampsPlus.com for Munchkin’s bedroom and ours as well. Stainless steel finish, 42″ blade: cute, and just perfect for smallish rooms and 8-foot ceilings. Then along came Hubby and argued with me. He tends to do that. Likes a good “debate”, as he calls it. I call it arguing.

His argument/debate was that the 42″ blades were not long enough, especially during the cruel Tucson summers when one is brave to even put a sheet over oneself in bed. So I agreed that on a trip out of town for New Year that happened to see us bypassing a Lamps Plus store, we would exchange them.

And so our ceiling lamps travelled some 500 miles: up to Williams, AZ and the Grand Canyon, then back down to Phoenix where we celebrated New Year, and thence to a Lamps Plus. Because of the size of the boxes, we decided to drive not my nippy, reliable wee car but Hubby’s old and far less reliable, but roomy, SUV. He’d done some work on it all of last week and so I was confident of its roadworthiness. And it did good, until we were about 200 yards from the Lamps Plus store. Then it gave up the ghost, blowing a rather important fuse. A few changed fuses and more blown ones later, I declared that lunch was needed.

Happily, we broke down at a strip of shops and restaurants, so we could walk over for lunch to a restaurant, where Hubby negotiated with the AAA and also a truck rental firm (because AAA will charge you if you’re being towed from outside of 100 miles of your home). No matter. It was a beautiful day, and a new year at that. We kept smiling through it and, knowing we had to wait a while for a tow truck or rental anyway, decided to walk to Lamps Plus. Hence the stolen trolley, to transport our fans.

I told Sweetpea and Munchkin to put on their best homeless face. Sweetpea instead looked mortified. And off we trudged through a car park, along a street, across a crossing, along another street, and to the store. All for nothing, as it turned out. We were told these coolio fans don’t come in anything more than 42″ blades and I didn’t want any others. So back went the ceiling fans in the trolley, we did our trudging homeless act again, and were back where we started.

It took six hours from when the truck broke down to finally leaving. So there was nothing for it but to go shopping. Two handbags, a makeup bag (remember Hubby throwing up in mine after that party at Hallowe’en?), activity books for kiddos and some dog food (?) later, we got our U-Haul. This is what we then set off in, highly illegally:

The AAA truck wouldn’t have taken us anyway, since there were four of us. By hiring a truck we were able to circumvent any rules on passenger numbers. But it wasn’t pretty. This thing only had two seats. So there was Sweetpea in the passenger seat, Munchkin in his booster seat on the floor between her and Hubby – no seatbelt at all – and me, meanwhile, lying along the back seat of our truck that was being towed.

It was hideous. Not only really uncomfortable because my legs are too long to stretch out along the back seat, but wholly frightening. You’re bumping along a busy Interstate, staring at the sky, with no control at all over your situation. I kept thinking that people had had to endure worse things in vehicles, like being smuggled across the border with fifty other people and no water, or clinging on to the underside of a car whilst crossing the border from the old East to West Germany. You know, happy thoughts. And also: “WTF? If this is a sign of my year to come, I don’t like it. Please time-travel me back to 2011 immediately.”

Forty miles later we were within our 100 miles and felt a whole lot happier (and less criminal-like) phoning AAA and asking them to tow the truck, Hubby and Sweetpea from there. I, meanwhile, had to drive that sodding great U-Haul back to Tucson. And just to put a cherry on top of it all, when I pulled up here I realized I didn’t have my house keys.

We had gaily left the place two days before, me saying: “Should I take my keys?”

Hubby: “Well it’s not as if we’ll be travelling back separately is it? Ha ha!”

Me: “Ha ha! You’re right!”

Ha bloody ha indeed. And thank goodness for leaving spare keys with the neighbours.

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