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Yesterday 

By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (1)
Tue, 08 Mar 22 1:52 PM | 44 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 30118 of 60008
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We had quite an adventure yesterday.

We needed to pick up about two tons of ceramic tile from a Floor & Decor store in Nashua. That weight is beyond my truck's capacity and our flatbed trailer is currently out of commission. So we drove to a town that's not too distant and rented a cargo van.

We got the tile, hauled it to our barn and unloaded. That's when the problems began. My wife went to sit in the van while I finished up. She took the van key but left her other keys on the barn floor for me, thinking that I'd need 'em to lock up. I didn't need them to lock up and did so NEVER PICKING UP THE KEYS.

She drove us most of the way back to the U-haul dealer, then asked me if I had her keys. "No, I do not," I said. Whoops. That meant that if we returned the van, we wouldn't be able to open the car we'd left there and would be stranded.

We keep spare house keys hidden outside our house. We detoured to the house to get them. The keys are in a medicine bottle, in a zip-lock bag, in an old car tire that surrounds our septic tank cap. I don't mind sharing that because I'll NEVER put them there again!

We're currently in a warm spell. It was raining hard (a storm micro sent our way, btw. Thanks for that, micro! I got soaked.) The warm rain DID melt off our snow. But when I reached into the tire to retrieve the bag with our keys, all I felt was a big ring of ice filling the whole thing. Yikes! Car tires are, apparently, great insulators. The keys were encased in the ice. The ice was stuck in the tire.

The warm weather was our one lucky break. The tire wasn't cemented to the ground like it would have been a week earlier. I was able to pick it up and flop it over repeatedly, eventually breaking up the ice enough to extract it from the tire. I got the bag out of one of the chunks and found it hadn't stayed sealed. It too was full of ice. I broke THAT ice apart, got the medicine bottle out and . . . IT was full of ice! The keys wouldn't come out.

Our garage wasn't locked, so I went into the garage bathroom and used its hot water to melt the ice in the medicine bottle to get the spare keys out. Easy peasy.

By the time I'd done all this, my wife had found another spare set of keys we'd hidden in the garage. Oh, sure. She's the one who got the house unlocked.

The rest was fairly uneventful. We took the van back to the U-haul dealer - arriving a stress-free 12 minutes before it closed, turned in the van, got our car back, drove back to the barn and retrieved my wife's car and house keys, finally getting home about two hours later than we should have, driving at about 5 mph through fog that, by then, was horrific. (Sidebar: how do you get horrific fog during a rainstorm? We still haven't figured that part out.) We put an extra 18 miles on the U-haul... at 29¢ per mile, so we had to pay $5.22 more. And gas was $4.29/gallon.

Lessons learned? NEVER leave keys on the floor of a building that's going to get locked up! And NEVER store spare keys in a tire when you live in snow country!




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months


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