When "they" say that home renovations are stressful, I get it. But I remind myself that it is a stress that we choose to participate in. Whatever stage of chaos we happen to be in at any given time, I just have to walk out onto what remains of a deck we have or gaze out the kitchen window and look across the mountain and truly I can feel the stress melting away. Well, there was the one entire month a year ago that we went without a functioning shower and had to avail ourselves of our gym memberships.
This past summer taken up with our regular work schedules, getting another business up and running, and turning our side of the mountain into a space that could be built on. Hours and hours of excavating dirt and building what Dave likes to call "The Great Wall of Heber", in order to add enough square footage to our tiny cabin to be able to host a family dinner where no one has to balance a plate on their knees, and an actual bedroom on the main floor so in the event our knees don't work so great we won't have to crawl up any stairs to go to bed. Just trying to be planners of the future here.
Summer, per usual, went by far too quickly and Fall was a mere blip on the calendar. Chomping at the bit to get our foundation concrete poured before the road was officially closed to any and all dual-axle vehicles, we finally got a date scheduled. The date just happened to be the very same week we were invited to stay with family in Cabo San Lucas. And Cabo San Lucas just happened to have a category four hurricane directly headed it's way. We called the airline to see if it would be possible to push the date further out. "Yes, but you'll need to pay the $500 difference in ticket prices." Terrific. "Never mind. We'll just take our chances flying into a hurricane." "Okay, Sir. You have a lovely day."
Checking the weather app on my phone every thirty minutes or so, we tracked the swirling red wind and rain patterns inching closer to our destination vacation spot. My visions of crystal blue water and warm sand on my feet were literally blowing away. "If it's meant to be then everything will work out." The hurricane made land-fall two days before we were to land. I logged onto the computer to do the pre-boarding business of our flights. I filled my information out, then filled Dave's out. His got red-lined. "What the heck." The passport card he had gotten for a cruise a few years ago, was not sufficient for air travel to Mexico. We called the airline to verify this was an absolute, and yes it for sure was and not only that, the agent said they could not see that we were scheduled for any flight leaving the next day, but that we were scheduled for a flight in two weeks. They agent that we had talked to a few days ago and told us to have a lovely day after we did not pay any money to change flight dates apparently changed it anyway; and without any confirmation of having done so.
Thinking warm, happy, sandy, beachy thoughts, "Okay, so we'll be so happy we didn't find this out after driving an hour to the airport, just to be told this."
This also meant that we'd now be home to watch the concrete trucks roll in to finally pour our foundation. I felt a little like the first time I got to go to Disneyland as a teenager. Or the first time I saw the Statue of Liberty. One of those kinds of firsts.
A crew of young men had been hammering concrete forms into place for the last several days, working madly to make the road closure deadline. As Dave likes to say "Nothing but asses and elbows." Seriously, they worked non-stop, and I appreciate their incredible work ethic and abilities.
As the concrete poured into the forms, I stood at the kitchen sink, realizing that someday this would not be the spot I would do dishes anymore but it would be the path that would lead me either to the right to a breakfast nook, to the left to a wall of bookshelves or straight ahead to a much larger kitchen that will have more than one drawer.
While I watched, I got on the phone with the passport office. I was told that to expedite a passport book, it would still likely take weeks. Or, we could make an in-person appointment in either Arizona or Colorado and get one same day. Again, looking to my weather app, I see clear skies and warm temperatures for the next couple of days; with snow showing up a few days later. I text Dave "Let's go to Colorado and get your passport same day! It's just a mere eight-hour drive!"
Somehow, he agreed to go along with my plan. Most likely he was distracted looking at the beginnings of his new garage. Garages are a dude's jam. Sort of like a kitchen thrills me. So, I call it the future garage "his", and he calls the future kitchen "hers".
We call the passport office in Colorado and schedule an appointment for Thursday. We'll leave Wednesday morning, stay overnight, go to the passport office, do the passport thing, then drive the mere eight hours back home and be ready for work the next day. Easy.
I book a hotel for us based on price. This isn't a fun trip. This is a trip with one purpose. Get that passport book to the the warm sand between our toes.
The concrete is poured. The hotel is booked. Our overnight bag is packed. The traveling food is prepped and we tell the cats we'll see them in a couple of days.
Dave logs into the work computer and phone and I drive. Also, why is an egg-salad sandwich the most delicious thing to eat on a road-trip. Especially on freshly baked sourdough bread.
Stopping at a couple of gas stations along the way, mostly to stretch our legs and use the restrooms, I'm not so inclined to buy junk food if I've packed a cooler of yummy home-made food. I'm getting too old to be eating gas station food and not have it make me feel rather miserable.
We arrive at our hotel. The hotel I picked based on price. As the young lady at the desk hands us our key cards, she reminds us "This is a smoke-free hotel. Your room is on the third floor, enjoy your stay." The elevator door slowly jerks open. We step inside. Dave presses the "3" button and it jerks even more slowly closed. The ride up is so jerky I look at Dave with the "I'm getting off this ride right now and taking the stairs" look. The elevator stops and the door jerks open on floor 2. No one is standing outside it. The door jerks closed and we take another short jerky ride up one more floor. The walk down the hallway towards our assigned room tells me that this in fact not a smoke-free hotel. At least it is most certainly not a mariguana smoke-free hotel. "Maybe it's just the hallway and our room won't be so bad." We enter the room. It's clean. It also has a smoke detector that's beeping. "Let's call the front desk and see if maintenance can replace the battery." We call. There is no maintenance. We take the jerky ride back down the elevator to see if the front desk people at least have a battery. They do. We take ther jerky ride back up the elevator and go back down the smoky hallway , back to our room and Dave replaces the battery in the smoke detector. And now my eyes are burning from the smoke coming from the "smoke-free hotel".
We gather our belongings, take the jerky ride back down the elevator and tell the front desk that we'd like to check out after our fifteen-minute stay thank you very much. The young man tells us that he can't refund us the money but to call his manager in the morning and she can help us. We walk swiftly to the car and drive five minutes down the road to a hotel we're more familiar with, costs $20 more per night, and offers free water bottles since we're now "silver members". And quite frankly I've worked up a good thirst by now and being a silver member seems like a pretty dang nice perk, even though our car is filled with water bottles we've packed for the trip. It's just the mere idea of being the slightest bit pampered at this point that I'm relishing. They even let us choose room temperature water bottles or chilled water bottles. It's almost as good as sand between my toes at this point.
The young lady hands us our room temperature water bottles, and our key fobs. One elevator is out of order. I press the button of the working one. The door opens smoothly. We're on a roll. We take the ride up to the fifth floor. The door opens on the fifth floor. No smoke smell so far. Check. We open the door to our room. Super clean and familiar. We're starting to finally relax. Plopping our bags and computers down I walk over to the window to close the curtains. Except there are no curtains. I call on the land-line (which I hardly know how to dial out it's been so long since I've used one) and call the front desk. "Ummmm we just checked into our room and we're wondering if all the rooms don't come with curtains or if it's just this one?"
A smooth elevator ride down one floor and we were quickly switched to a room that had curtains. Dave logged onto the computer to answer work emails. I ran a bath and envisioned warm sand between my toes.
Sometimes life throws chaos at us. Sometimes we create our own chaos. Either way it's living and experiencing and learning and growing. Several years ago, I was standing at my kitchen bar talking with my mother while she sat on a bar-stool taking the meat off a rotisserie chicken. A piece of chicken for the bowl, a nibble of chicken for her was the deal. I was telling her about an incredibly difficult and weird day I'd had. She reached over and grabbed a paper plate and pencil.. "Here! I'm going to write everything down you just told me. If you don't you'll either forget, or you won't believe it ever really happened unless you see it in writing!" I came across that paper plate the other day when I was going through some old boxes. That moment and the day that I had told her about all came flooding back to me.
This is why I journal. Because often things that seem hard at the time, often really aren't so bad after all.
And sometimes the really hard things truly are bad, but we get through them and we become stronger and better for it.
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