Last Saturday, we drove our kids over to Yuma, to hand them over to my parents for a week. We made it to Yuma easily on a fully charged battery - the gauge read 99 miles when we pulled into the superchargers in Yuma to refill. There were four other Teslas there - three California plates and one Arizona plate. We spent 45 minutes in the bar at the Hilton Garden Inn while the Tesla recharged - not the most atmospheric bar, but comfortable and they even gave us free chips and salsa. If it had been a little less hot or if we'd been looking for something more than just a place to sit and chat, we might have walked the short distance to a more interesting bar in downtown Yuma or over to a coffee shop we've liked on previous visits. But the Hilton Garden Inn did just fine.
Once the Tesla was recharged, we headed home. I can report that the Tesla is pretty amazing in the mountains. We zoomed up the mountains without noticing any difference in how the car drives. Mr. Snarky was driving - his choice, he'd been looking forward to seeing how the Tesla handled the hills and the curves - and he said it was a lot of fun. We burned through more charge than usual going up the mountains, but then made some of that back coming down. Anyway, we made it home with plenty of charge to spare.
So that was nice.
The rest of the week didn't go quite to plan.
Petunia has been asking for a loft bed, and it is true that having one would make her room less crowded feeling. However, before we put a new bed in her room, we wanted to change the carpet in the kids' rooms. It was 12 years old and showing its age. So, we picked out some new carpet, ordered it to have it arrive on the Monday after the kids left for Arizona, spent the week ahead packing their rooms up, spent a good part of Sunday moving furniture out of their rooms.... and then the carpet wasn't here in time.
First, the carpet place told us they could install on Wednesday. Mr. Snarky arranged to work from home (and we arranged for the new loft bed to be delivered on the same day, so we'd only have to work from home once). Then the carpet wasn't here on Wednesday, either, but they could tear up the old carpet. By this time, Mr. Snarky had gone in to work, so I came home early... only to get a text at 4 p.m. telling me that no, they'd tear out Thursday morning and install the new carpet Thursday afternoon. So I arranged to work from home on Thursday, and took a break outside to avoid the dust and fumes when the old carpet was removed. But then at about 3 p.m., I got a text saying the new carpet still wasn't here, so maybe they'd install on Friday, if the carpet arrived in time. I already work from home on Fridays, so FINE, we'd make that work.
But then Friday morning I had some sort of... I don't know what to call it. I had sharp pains in my lower abdomen that eased a bit if I rested, but got basically unbearable if I sat up (to send emails, for instance), and didn't go away even after a couple of hours. So at about 8 a.m., we decided to go to urgent care.
It turns out that if you show up at urgent care in obvious pain talking about sharp pains in your lower abdomen, you get wooshed to the front of the line and seen right away. Once I saw the doctor, I realized that this was because they needed to find out if I had appendicitis and should be put in an ambulance.
The good news is that I did NOT have appendicitis. The bad news is that we didn't figure out what was causing the pain. But the other good news is that it just went away on its own about an hour after we got to urgent care.
So, I was home by lunch time with a bottle of prescription-strength ibuprofen and a bit of a pain hangover. I decided to take the rest of the day off, too, and spent the day on the sofa reading. My book club read
Over Sea, Under Stone, the YA fantasy by Susan Cooper, awhile back. I'd never read it before, so my sister lent me the rest of the series. The books have been sitting on my shelves waiting for me to read them. In my time on Thursday outside avoiding dust and fumes, I finished
The Dark is Rising. I read the remaining three books in the series on Friday. They were perfect for distracting me from the pain in the morning, and for keeping me happily resting in the afternoon.
I'd told Mr. Snarky that if the carpet people texted to say they were ready to install, he was to abandon me at urgent care. I could get a Lyft home. However, they didn't not text until after lunch... but this time, the news was good, and the carpet was installed by about 4 p.m.
We like our new carpet! But the delay in installation meant that we spent Saturday assembling loft beds. (Pumpkin has had one for many years, and now Petunia has a matching one - Stuva, from Ikea. They're great.) The kids arrived back with my parents in the late afternoon. Petunia was delighted by her new bed. But that was all we'd gotten done - both beds and desks were built, but no other furniture had been returned to their rooms. We did that today, and also got all the furniture back in our guest room/music room, which is the only other room in the house with carpet.
We had hoped to build and move furniture slowly over the course of the week, while also enjoying interesting dinners out. We had a couple of good dinners at new restaurants, but by Wednesday we were so demoralized by the carpet situation that we stayed near home and ate at restaurants in our neighborhood, all of which we've visited before. Still, the dinners were good and we had a nice time.
All's well that ends well, I guess - the kids are both asleep in their loft beds, their furniture is back in their rooms, and they are in the process of unpacking all of their boxes. I haven't had the abdominal pains again, which is good because the urgent care doctor told me that if they came back I should go straight to the ER, since the next test to do would be a CAT scan. I have a follow up visit with my primary care doctor a week from tomorrow. She may decide to order the scan even with no recurrence of the pain. Or she may say I should wait and see if they come back.
My plans for the week without kids went seriously awry. I started but did not finish a blog post over at Adjusted Latitudes, and the post I planned to write for my real name blog didn't even get started. I obviously failed to write a weekend reading post - which is a shame, because in addition to some interesting links, I wanted to tell everyone that I'm running a sale on
The Dodo Knight right now - get the ebook for just $0.99! The price goes back up later this week.
But, I did enjoy the time reading the Susan Cooper books, so I guess I'll just regroup and see what I can get done this week.
