The washer and dryer delivery went very well: the nice delivery guys brought our pedestals in from the garage for us and, when we discovered that the protective feet were missing from one of them, even pulled the heads off some shuttlecocks to put below it for us. Clint tipped them $10 before they left, and they seemed happy about that. : ) (We definitely need to get these things painted to match the washer and dryer; it looks kind of thrown-together right now. . . . )

Alexander and Timothy got along well for most of the day; they had a few moments where they couldn’t agree on what to do, but played pretty nicely up until the last couple of hours.

At one point, Alexander fell and scraped his knee and Timothy came running inside to tell me. I set Christina on the floor and hollered at Clint, “watch her!” Timothy had been on his way back to see Alexander, but he immediately spun on his heel and headed in to watch Christina; when he saw Clint coming he backpedaled, saying “ohhh. . . .” It’s easy to tell he has a little sister. : )

The refrigerator delivery did not go smoothly. The driver called and told Clint “we’ll be there in seven minutes.” He didn’t say there was anything he needed us to do, just told us when to expect him. When he arrived, he came in to see where the fridge was going, and told me to move a couple of things to make room for it to come through. A few minutes later, he came in and asked, “is that thing empty yet?” We looked at him blankly, since he hadn’t said anything about emptying it. He said, “I can’t move it until it’s completely empty. I won’t bring this one in until I bring that one out.” He acted very annoyed with us, and stalked back to the truck to wait.

I don’t understand why they couldn’t just move the old refrigerator to the other side of the room and bring the new one in; if they did, we’d just need to move everything once. The way he wanted us to do it, we had to put all of our refrigerated stuff on the counter and leave it there until they were through installing the new refrigerator, then move it all again to put it away. My way makes much more sense.

In any case, we did what he said, and emptied everything onto the counters. He came in, pulled the fridge out, and said “I can’t install your new water line. We don’t do copper pipes.” After some discussion, he finally said that he could do it, but we’d have to sign a paper releasing him from liability. Fine. Whatever. Just bring in the fridge so I can put my food away.

Well, Clint went out to shut the water off and couldn’t do it*. The hole containing the shut-off valve was full of dirt and he couldn’t find the valve. The delivery drivers told us that since we couldn’t shut the water off, there was no way they could disconnect the old water line, so they could leave the fridge, or try to come back Tuesday. We told them to just leave it, so they left.

Now I had to put everything back in the old fridge. If he’d done it my way, he’d have seen the copper line immediately, and we would have learned all of this before we even thought about taking anything out of the refrigerator. I can’t stand dealing with people like that.

They did not get a tip.

Del and Colleen come home Tuesday evening. Hopefully, we can get Del out here Wednesday or Thursday to help us install a shut-off valve behind the fridge, and we can actually start using the new one. . . .

On a different note: we sold our old washer already! I put the ad up on craigslist last night, and a couple came tonight to look at it. They decided that they wanted it, so they gave us the money and came back to get it a couple of hours later. In that time I got two more emails asking about it, so maybe we could have gotten more money. Ah, well.

While we were waiting for the couple to come see the washer, we took Alexander to Dairy Queen for dinner. (This was prompted by my mentioning to Clint that I’d never had a banana split; he thought we needed to rectify that, sooner rather than later. I got one for my dessert — it was yummy!)

While we ate our dessert, we watched the last episode of Heroes, Season One. Now I’m curious to re-watch the first few episodes of Season Two, now that we know what led up to them. . . .

*Turns out that Clint did manage to turn the water off — but it was Janel’s water! (She came over later to find out if our water was off, too. She thought it might be the whole block, or maybe that the city had turned her water off because she’d watered too much. Oops.)

Clint says: It should be added that I turned the water off on the same underground water meter I used to turn our house water off when we installed our hot water heater several months ago. It wasn’t full of dirt then like it was today, so all I can assume is that there’s another valve that both Dad and I missed back then, but as there was no confusion about which valve it was then, we’re both (meaning Dad and I) quite confused now about how there could be more than one valve. Color me mystified.