484

My mother is coming to visit this weekend. She'll be here on Friday afternoon and is leaving on Tuesday. I had planned on getting everything ready for her on Friday afternoon, but then I volunteered to teach Junior Achievement to a group of second graders. So... I have tonight and tomorrow to get everything ready.

The house is more or less cleaned up, which is good. However, we don't have a guest bed. Guest mattresses, yes, but no box springs. So that has been a bit of a concern. Not that my mother wouldn't sleep on the couch (and honestly, it's more comfortable than any mattress in the house), but nobody wants to say "I made my mom sleep on the couch".

So imagine my excitement (or don't, because I'm telling you about it) when I saw a twin bed set on Craigslist for $25. I'm a huge friend of Craigslist because it relies mainly on folks being honest and harkens (what a word) back to the days of barter. This is a very good deal for a bed, so I swooped in and grabbed it up.

When DH came home from work, we immediately set out to pick up the bed. I was at least smart enough to clean up the car before he got home. We put the address into the nav system and drove down to Highway 484. And drove. And drove. The roads were pretty familiar - until we hit dirt. And kept driving on dirt. This was serious off-roading. DH called the woman again who explained that she just moved in so she didn't really know the roads around her house, but she had a white trailer with red shutters (we passed no less than seven of these in a three mile strip). So we finally got to her house, where we both observed that she'd transposed the house number in her e-mail.

So we pulled the bed out of the house and stuck it in the car and headed out on our merry way. I tried to ignore that she had three cats in the house and four dogs outside yipping like mad to get back into the house as we were leaving. I could not, however, ignore the smell. The mattress smelled. Imagine age and wood smoke (or cigarette smoke) and must and age. Yup. Smelled.

The bright side to the next piece of the drive was that we happened to be near some folks who sell duck eggs, and we got 18 eggs for $2 bucks. Unbelievable deal. From there we had about a two mile drive to WalMart to grab a few items. I begged DH to drive to the back of the store to dump the mattress - because all we needed was the box spring(s), and I couldn't take the smell. I learned that WalMart has no dumpster - their compacter is attached to the back of the store. Go figure.

So we got our stuff, which always turns out being more stuff than the stuff that we went in for in the first place. So we come out and it's 8pm and almost dark and I beg DH to drive over to the gas station to dump the mattress. And he says no because there are too many lights. So I say go to the Denny's and dump it. And he says do you not see the lights? And I say yes I see the lights but who cares? And he says that he doesn't want to get arrested for dumping the mattress.

Ok. So we drive around to the back of Beall's dept store. And it's dark and DH is driving like 10 miles an hour scoping all around talking about all of the security cameras. And then he parks in a shadow and jumps out and hauls out the mattress and throws it BEHIND the dumpster (isn't that littering)? And as he does so a car drives by on a road by the dumpster. That was really funny. And as we leave I ask him if he took the tags off the mattress too, because if so they'll double his jail sentence.