snug as a bug in a rug :-)

so today . . . my baby is back in the garage! yay!!

no, not diandra! diandra is in oregon helping her best friend get married.

i'm talking about my car.

my car has had a rough few months. it all started at the old house when i noticed the hot water heater was leaking a bit--quite a bit, actually--which meant moving all the (now) wet boxes that i had stacked in front of it to the other side of the garage. where my car was usually parked. which meant that my car had to be moved to the driveway... the cold, dark, wet from the neighbor's sprinkler overspray, driveway...

and then we bought a house, which meant i had to start packing boxes. but the boxes had to be put somewhere, and the house was starting to look like ground zero, so some of the packed boxes joined the previously wet boxes in the other side of the garage... where my car was usually parked. which meant my car had to huddle in the driveway for a little longer...

and then we moved to the new house where we no longer had a three car garage. now we had a cozy two car garage. but here's the thing about two car garages--they are designed to hold two cars. just two. and when you have two cars that you would like to keep in the garage, that doesn't leave a lot of room for washers and dryers. or workbenches and tools. or golf clubs and bowling balls. or a shop vac and a bowflex. and so my car was still camped out on the driveway...

but the lack of space in the new garage was only part of the problem. the other part of the problem was that we didn't get any remotes for the garage door opener. our new garage has a really nice garage door opener, and it works just great... IF you stand in the doorway to the house and press the button. it is quiet. it is fast. it has a laser safety feature. but no remotes. and so the only way to open and close the garage door is by pressing the switch next to the door into the house and then running out of the garage as fast as you can. which is complicated by the laser beam safety. because when you break that laser beam, the door stops. so to get out of the garage, you have to hit the button by the door, run really fast toward the driveway, leap OVER the laser beam (which, btw, you can't see,) and hope you don't smack your head on the descending garage door.

and of course you can't do any of that from inside the car.

so until the problem of the remotes could be fixed, my car still sat in the driveway...

our realtor, jill, assured us that she could take care of this remote problem. we were not going to get any remotes from the sellers. they were not the most cooperative people we have ever encountered. but rollie climbed up on a ladder, wrote down all the necessary numbers from the unit, and jill ordered new remotes from amazon...

problem solved.

maybe in the real world, but in julieland, the problem was NOT solved. the garage door openers from amazon wouldn't work. rollie tried everything! so jill called a garage door opener guy, and he came out, and HE tried everything, and it still wouldn't work.

and my car was still sitting in the driveway, collecting dust and water marks from our sprinkler overspray. i was seriously starting to worry about the paint. watermarks on black shiny paint are not good... not good at all!

and then, while we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago, jill had the garage door opener guy come back, and he connected some sort of device to the garage door opener so that it would work with a new set of remotes.

yay! my car was pretty excited. so was rollie. so was i...

... until we got back from vacation, and i opened the garage door only to remember that i had put a bunch of boxes in the garage in order to get the last of the stuff out of the old house. so now even though i had garage door openers that worked, i still couldn't get my car into the garage...

sigh.

i immediately started trying to unpack those boxes to clear out that space. but i kept getting sidetracked. like yesterday. yesterday, i rearranged the kitchen cabinets. yes i said rearranged! i unpacked the kitchen a month ago, but i found a few more kitchen things in the boxes in the garage yesterday. and when i brought them in to find a place for them, i found that there wasn't a place for them. so i rearranged things. in the kitchen. which used up time i could have spent unpacking more boxes...

you see, this is why it is taking me so long to unpack! i want everything to be in the perfect place. but i don't always immediately know where the perfect place is. so even after i have unpacked, i am still moving things around...

but a few days ago, i was alarmed by how terrible my car was looking. i was suddenly worried that maybe the paint was going to be ruined, if i didn't get it in the garage pretty soon. so i stayed up until 3:00 a.m. last night working in the garage. and finally, i had cleared enough space to get my car into the garage!

oh it still isn't perfect. there are a bunch of boxes that are diandra's which need to be moved to her storage unit. there are some boxes that need to go to my school. and rollie hasn't had a chance to put up the shelving yet that is going to hold the bowling balls and golf clubs. so one side of my car is still crowded. but the important thing is that when the sprinklers go off at 5:00 a.m. the water is not going to be hitting my nice, clean, shiny car...

because now my car is nice and shiny and clean. rollie took it to the car wash today. and those water spots? they wouldn't come off. it was pretty bad. but those car wash guys have some tricks up their sleeves, and they somehow used some clay to remove the water deposits from my paint. and now my car is very shiny, and happy, sitting in our new garage.which is where it is going to stay! because that car wash magic? i'm sure it is cheaper than a new paint job, but maybe not by much...