Saturday, October 13, 2007

It's good to have friends




The company I work for has silent auctions twice a year to support charities. In the fall, it's for the United Way. In the spring, it's for Relay for Life. Each group/site can/does put up their own auction but anyone can bid on any of the auctions. Oh, and the auctions are staggered when they start and stop so that you can find an auction open for about a month and a half to two months, but typically the individual auctions run about two weeks or so.

Anyway, I recently bid (and won) a desk and a bookcase in an auction for a site across town. I had to pick it up from the person who donated it, who lives 50+ miles from me. Which is fine...I have a good friend who agreed to help me pick it up. Okay.

So, my friend picked me up this morning at 7:00 a.m. so we could go pick it up. We got there about 8:30 or so (we made one stop to pick up something from my friend's friend's house). Now, I should tell you that we found out that the furniture was purchased in Belgium. Packed up and shipped here, and made it in mint condition. This man and his wife (who we found out after the fact delivered a baby ONE MONTH AGO! when we asked why he'd let her help move furniture so soon after giving birth, his response was "it's okay, she's strong." Way down on the "good husband" competition [another story that I'll blog about soon] if you ask me!) loaded the furniture into my friend's truck. They gave us blankets to keep it from scratching, rope to tie it in (we couldn't close the thing...what do you call it? the tailgate? anyway...) and secured it safely for us and sent us on our way, all without causing any damage whatsoever to the furniture. My friend and I get back to my house, with it in tact, and promptly drop the desk out of the bed of the truck.

Actually the damage was minimal and on the back of the desk so I wasn't terribly upset, truth told. But then, we realized that we couldn't fit it through my garage door as it was. So we tried to lift the top off of it but only one side would come up so she started twisting it, which did a bit of damage. I looked at it and didn't say much because I knew I could glue it back and it would be fine. But we couldn't get it into the house. I finally went to get my neighbor to ask for help who promptly pulled off the pieces of wood that I'd planned on securing with glue, compromising the furniture even more.

Long story short, we finally got it disassembled enough to get it into the house but I really need to find the wood glue. Oh, and by the way, the desk is a lot bigger than it looked in the picture, which was part of the problem. But we got it in and assembled, which was the important thing, right?

Anyway, afterwards my friend decided that she wanted to trim back my trees and dig up the few remaining landscaping rocks I had left around my tree (I dug up most of them a long time ago and then ran out of steam and never finished it.) And you know, there are a lot of people who if they'd done that at my house, I would've been offended. But not this friend because I know she didn't mean anything bad by it. It was just cracking me up because she just makes herself at home here, and only good friends do that.

Which was the point of this blog...it's good to have good friends. :-)

1 comment:

Ellen said...

Great story! It sounds like nice furniture, even if a hassle to move/glue back together.

I agree that good friends are PRICELESS. Better than Prozac. LOVE the cartoon. LOL!