I think I should start by telling you that Mike and I have sold Luby’s Plaza on the Strip in Lake Ozark, Missouri!
Yay!
It’s been a long time coming as we’ve wanted to sell for a few years now.
“Who bought it?” you may wonder.
“George and his brother Gregory of Tucker’s Shucker’s, a neighboring business, bought us out.
Word of the sale had gotten around town and our friends and business associates threw us a party. There was cake and ice cream, a beautiful certificate and a bouquet of flowers in a beautiful antique pitcher.
When we were told of the party Mike was sure that no one would show up. At the appointed time we walked out to the stage in our parking lot and there were about a dozen people gathered there. We greeted everyone and sat for a photograph and then there were kind words spoken before the cutting of the cake.
Mike was truly touched and got all choked up and could hardly speak. He cleared his throat and continued his thank you speech. All of this was captured on video and can be seen online at Lake of the Ozarks News Update, June 6, 2016. Here’s the link, copy and paste it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GigobaSXBc&feature=player_embedded&list=PLSH6wE0oJYY6zjjViSw5dDTQ6tYCAwKfg
As time went on even more people drifted in to bid us so long…
♫♪So long, ♪farewell, ♫auf wiedersehen, ♪adieu♫♪
♪Adieu, adieu to you and you and you♫♪
There. You got to hear me sing. (That was from The Sound of Music.)
We’ve had a verbal agreement with George on this sale for several months now but until the papers were signed I hadn’t wanted to say anything. I didn’t want to jinx it. I didn’t even want to get my hopes up because you may remember that we had a sale pending about a year ago and the night before the papers were to be signed the guy backed out. I didn’t want to go through that again. Boy! What a let down!
But it all worked out and the guy that would have bought it last year has since closed one of his business’s so maybe it was all for the best anyway.
“What are you going to do now?” you ask.
Mike and I want to finish our house in Pennsylvania. So our plans are to go there for the rest of the summer. After that? Who knows. Things can turn on a dime around here.
Needless to say, with the flurry of packing going on around here, everything is in an uproar.
I made time to visit with Miss Helen last week and I gave her the news.
“Will you have time to come and help me?” Miss Helen asked.
“Absolutely!” I told her. Even if I didn’t have the time, I’d make the time.
It’s been hot here. Really hot. Too hot to be out in the blaze of the afternoon sun. So Miss Helen and I made plans for me to come in the evening and help in her flower beds.
Doesn’t she look fabulous!
For two nights in a row I pulled weeds and flowers and …
“Wait, wait, wait, Peg,” you say. “You pulled flowers?”
Yes, flowers. Iris’s mostly. Miss Helen loves her flowerbeds. She loves to be outside and she loves taking care of her flowerbeds. But Miss Helen is getting to a point in her life where it’s getting harder and harder for her to do this work and the kid who mows for her doesn’t do it.
“I would even be willing to pay him a little extra,” she told me. But it’s a struggle just to get the mowing and weed-eating done, let alone anything extra like pulling the trees and weeds that grow up amongst the flowers!
Seeing the flowerbeds in such a state just breaks Miss Helen’s heart. “I’m just going to get rid of the beds and let him weed-eat everything down,” she told me. Not having flowerbeds at all is better than seeing them uncared for.
So, with no particular care, I pulled iris’s, lilies of the valley, rose of Sharon’s, ivy from the brick wall of her tidy little home, trimmed back the clematis, and pulled a ton of wild grape vines off her bush honeysuckle.
Whew!
Miss Helen helped me get everything bagged up and ready for a lady that will come and take her garden debris away for her.
“What does she do with it?” I asked her once.
“I think she uses it in composting,” Miss Helen said.
I saved some of the flowers to share with my best girl, Linda,
and because iris bulbs can be dried and stored for long periods of time, I’ll take a bunch back to Pennsylvania for family and my neighbors if they want some.
Something else I needed to get done before we move is make a dragonfly with Kathryn. She’s the young gal that lives in our old apartment (her boyfriend calls her Kat). We talked about doing this since the last time we were together and made owls and now with our move imminent, I figured we had better get it done.
Kathryn had some time on Wednesday and when she got there I set her to work picking her colors. She picked red gobs for the center of the dragonfly and two different blues for the wings. She traced the wing pattern onto the glass and cut them out while I picked out the pattern for a couple of simple angels I wanted to make for Miss Helen. Then while Kathryn was grinding her pieces, I cut mine, and as she foiled hers, I ground mine.
I’d forgotten I needed to make halos for the angels and had to go looking for the piece of pipe I use to form them with.
“Where in the world did I put that,” I mumbled as much to myself as to Kathryn as I searched through boxes and tubs. “ ♪Where oh where can it be♫” I ended up singing. “There, you got to hear me sing,” I told her. “Aren’t you glad?” Truly, if you ever hear me sing, you won’t be glad, unless you like off-key, can’t carry a tune in a bucket kind of singing, then I’m right up your alley!
I didn’t seem to have the right size pipe so I had to raid Mike’s stash of plumbing in the garage and I found one that worked.
And did I take a picture of Miss Helen’s angels?
NO!
Although I wasn’t crazy about the colors that Kathryn picked — it’s her dragonfly, it can be whatever color she wants it to be — when it was done I thought it was really cute!
“You need to be careful when you wash this. Solder isn’t strong and you’ll break it,” I warned Kathryn.
“Okay,” she says and about that time Mike comes in and we start chatting as she’s scrubbing away with a soft bristle brush, soap and warm water, and slowly her flattened hand comes up into a cup…
I saw the dragonfly bend. “Careful, hon,” I told her.
Kathryn turned the water off and as she dried her dragonfly (and straightened it back out) it broke.
“Oh!” she exclaimed.
Our time was running out and Kathryn had to get going to work.
“I know you don’t have time so I’ll fix it for you and you can pick it up after work tonight,” I volunteered. Kathryn holds down three part time jobs and this is her in her Casey’s smock.
If there is time before Mike and I get out of the state, she would like to make a Longdangly or wind chime. And that will teach her how to drill holes in glass.
Thursday morning Mike and I took off with our big red truck and a trailer full of stuff. Just stuff! We have way too much stuff! But don’t we all just love our stuff? Stuff, stuff, stuff!
I didn’t really take very many pictures on this trip because I’ve been on these roads so many times and taken so many pictures of the barns and critters along the route and then did nothing with the photos — I figured why bother. If I get one or two barn photos for you guys that would be enough.
I thought this heart shaped window in the sleeper of this semi was different and something you don’t see every day.
We made our first gas stop in Kingdom City, just before we jump onto I-70 and even though we had only gone about 90 miles, it’s a chance to check tires and make sure everything is riding okay.
There are at least six double sided gas pumps at this truck stop and there was only one car there.
One car!
And guess which pump he was at?
“The one you want?” you guess.
Yes! The one we need! Big Red is diesel and this guy was at the only pump that had diesel.
“Why don’t you use the pumps the semis use?” you wonder.
The nozzles for the semis are much larger and the fuel pumps really fast. With no room for the air to escape it back splashes. So we have to use the diesel at the car pumps.
Mike pulled up behind this young couple with New Mexico, USA plates on the car and there was nothing to do but wait. The gas nozzle was sticking out of their car and he was washing the windshield.
“Maybe they’re about done,” I tried to temper Mike’s impatience.
“The pump is already off,” Mike said as he sat behind the wheel, twiddling his thumbs. I looked and saw he was right. The pump had kicked off.
The girl gets out of the car and gets one of those things you use to wash your windows with…
What do they call those things? I wonder. Is there a name for them?
I switched windows on my computer and posted to Facebook:
“Hey! Help me out! When you go to a gas station and you wash your windows-is there a name for that window washing thing?” I posted, then I decided to Google it while I waited. All the pictures on all the images that came up in my search called it a washer/squeegee. I went back to my letter blog and continued to write, deciding to call it a window washer. It wasn’t too long until Michelle, one of my beautiful daughter-in-law’s beautiful sisters replied.
“Squeegee??” she guessed.
A few minutes later another of Kandyce’s beautiful sisters, in fact her twin Krysten, confirmed Michelle’s guess. “A squeegee,” she replied.
Good enough for me.
So the girl gets out of the car and gets a squeegee from one of the other stations and starts washing the side windows on her side of the car as the guy walks around the front of the car to do her side of the windshield.
Ding! goes my computer. It notifies me when someone responds to my posts. I switched over and it was that handsome youngest son of ours, Kevin.
“Oh wait, I believe it’s called a squirrel,” he replied.
A squirrel? I rolled it over in my head a couple of times. Is he pulling my leg or is he serious? I wondered. I know that people often have pet names for common things. Like those pieces of tires along the highways. Truckers call them alligators. So I guess it’s possible in some world it’s called a squirrel.
“Really!” I replied.
“Yep,” he answered.
I was on the verge of Googling it when Kevin laughed, “LOL.” So I do think he was just pulling my leg. Smart aleck kid!
The pump is off, the guy is washing the passenger side windshield, the gal picked up a squeegee and is slowly washing the side windows and they never look at us as we sat there waiting for them to move — and they knew we were there. How could they not know! That big ol’ honkin’ F-550, four door, four wheel drive, with 11-22-5 tires (the means they are semi tires) Freightliner polished aluminum wheels, with 10 lug nuts, (guess who made me write all that?) diesel engine running (and you know how loud that is), pulling a twenty-four foot trailer — they knew! And they never once looked at us. They were talking across the car to each other and in my mind’s eye I could hear their conversation.
“Why didn’t they pick a different pump?”
“I don’t know but screw them! We were here first. They can just wait!”
And they just weren’t in any hurry at all as the man finished the passenger side of the front windshield, goes around the front of the car, drops his squeegee back in the bucket, takes the gas nozzle from his car and hangs it up.
“Finally!” we say in unison and breathe a sigh of relief.
Then the man picked up the squeegee again, shook off the excess fluid and proceeded to wash the side windows on his side of the car as the woman moved around the back of the car and washes the back window!
Ay-yay-yay!
“Maybe this is God’s way of keeping us off the road right now,” I speculated.
She finished the back window, he finished his side and I think they are finally going to move, but do they move?
NO!
She didn’t do a good enough job on the back window and he has to wash it all over again!
“I should have pulled up closer so the heat of the engine’s on them,” Mike said. “In fact…” He sat up a little straighter, put the truck in gear and seriously invaded their space.
“This is bullshit,” I can hear the man say in my mind’s eye.
“Com’on honey, let’s just go,” she says.
And they put the squeegees back in the buckets, got in their car, started it up and drove around to the next gas pump where they both got back out.
As Mike’s filling the truck, I watch as they get a squeegee from a bucket and start to wash the windows again.
Really?
Mike climbs back in the truck. “I gotta pee before we get going again.”
“Me too, and the girls too,” I say. “Let’s go over by the grass.”
Mike pulls the truck away from the pumps and we park. I walk the girls and as we head in to the restrooms, we see that couple is still sitting there washing those windows!
We got back on the road and got through St. Louis just fine. On the other side though, traffic was stopped.
“Accident?” I ask.
“Maybe that’s why we were supposed to stay off the road,” Mike mused.
It was stop and go for many miles, more stopping than going, but eventually we get close enough to see the reason. Road construction.
And you know what happens when everyone has to get into one lane, don’t you? People come up in the wrong lane, thinking to jump the line and that just makes everything worse than if they had waited their turn. Eventually a guy in a truck pulls up beside us and doesn’t let anyone else through and we started moving pretty good then. Once we reached the point where he had to merge into our lane we let him over in front of us in gratitude for stopping the line jumpers.
We hit rush hour traffic going through Indy then another bottle neck in Ohio, but both times we were only slowed and not stopped.
Ginger travels really well. She will curl up in my lap and sleep until she feels us slow down then she’ll get up and look out the window. Itsy…not so much. She is not a good traveler. I used to have to tie her so she had to stay on the couch during our travels in the RV, otherwise she wanted to ride under Mike’s feet; which is dangerous, or on my shoulder; which makes me have a sore neck. Then a couple of years ago we found a pet car booster seat, one that strapped over the center console in your car and Itsy rides in that pretty well.
Our old RV, the Thor, had a post with a tabletop that you could set up between the two front seats when you weren’t traveling. Mike took a piece of 2 by 12 and made a small table top with two cup holders in it. It fits on the base and is just the right size to strap Itsy’s car seat to while we travel. It worked so well that I never bothered to change the table tops, just leaving the homemade one on all the time. Then when we traded for our Bago we had a bracket installed for Itsy’s pedestal car seat. And I use the little table all the time! When we are parked it holds my little fan and often time what ever story I’m working on.
“What are those marks all over it?” you ask. “They look like burns.”
Well, they are. When we come back in from our walks, I’ll sit in my seat and pick the hitchhikers from the girls and with my trusty Bic, this is where they meet their fate.
So our problems with Itsy on this trip were unexpected. We had her car seat strapped to the center console in the truck but she wasn’t happy and kept scratching at Mike until she had a hole worn clean through his arm.
“She can’t see out of the windshield,” Mike said.
Whatever the reason for her misbehavior, I had to eventually tie her in the back seat from whence she cried and cried. But what else could we do!
As the day was coming to a close and Mike was tired from a full day of driving, he let me know he had been worrying about something.
“Do you think we could sleep in the truck tonight?” he asked.
I was shocked! In the past it has always been me who wanted to save a hundred bucks and sleep in our vehicle. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Well, the truck topper doesn’t lock and I’m afraid someone will break into it at the motel. Do you think these seats will recline far enough?”
“I don’t know. I guess we could try.”
Just north of Columbus, Ohio, in a Flying J truck stop, we pulled over for the night. We reclined our seats and after a few minutes we realized we needed to block the lights from the parking lot.
“Should I use one of my shirts?” Mike asked.
“I guess so.”
We really weren’t prepared for this but we would make do. He reached back and pulled one of his shirts from where it hung on its hanger in the back, lowered his window, tucked the shirt in and then shut the window on it.
“Do you want one too?” Mike asked.
“Yeah,” and he reached back and got me one of his shirts for my window.
Luckily we had our pillows with us and I always pack a couple of little Indian blankets. Mike likes the air conditioning cooler than I do so I often throw one across my lap as we travel. I had thrown a towel in the bottom of one of our bags to protect our clothes and I dug that out for us to hang across the windshield. Then we tried to sleep.
What a horrible night! It was hot, Mike would start the truck, then he got cold and shut it off, then it would get hot and he’d start it up again, then he got cold…anyway you get the idea.
Mike, with his long legs, had a terrible night. He not only had to sleep with the steering wheel in front of him, he had pedals on the floor to deal with. I could put my feet up on the dash or curl onto my side on the seat. Itsy slept on one of the blankets on the center console but Ginger wanted to sleep on my lap and that made it hard to change positions. I’d throw her off but as soon as I settled she climbed right back on me.
After what seemed like forever I managed to drifted off only to be woken by a click, click, clicking sound coming from my door. What in the world is that? I wondered. I looked over at Mike and he was curled onto his side, snoring. He’d found a position he could catch a few winks in and the clicking wasn’t loud enough to wake him.
I opened and closed my window, but it didn’t seem to affect the clicking. I took a chance and thumped my door panel hoping to not wake Mike but it was enough noise to rouse him and he shifted positions. The clicking stopped and I drifted back into a fitful sleep.
Neither one of us slept much that night and we were up early the next morning.
“Let’s get breakfast and I’ll walk the girls when we come back out,” I suggested to Mike.
This Flying J had a Denny’s so we went in for a sit down breakfast. There were only a couple of people there and we were shown to a table and given water and coffee. We ordered, chatted and sipped our drinks as we waited and the whole time people were trickling in by ones and twos and even fours!
From my seat I had a view of the kitchen and the lone cook. I watched as she filled the orders and kept the food coming out of the kitchen at a regular pace. We had our food without too much of a wait and I’ll tell you what! My food was good. It was all prepared perfectly. Nothing underdone or overdone. The oil she used to cook in was fresh. The bacon was light and crisp, but not too crisp and not too floppy. The pancakes were light and fluffy and believe it or not, the syrup was thick and not all watered down like you get in a lot of places.
As we paid our ticket I sent my compliments to the cook, both for her skill as a cook and for the speed at which she got the food out. I’ve had so much bad food in my 50 some years that I appreciate good food — even if it was just at a Denny’s!
I saved the girls some of my breakfast and when we got back out to the truck they greeted me with much anticipation. They could smell the food on us! I gave them some scrambled egg with cheese and a half a piece of bacon. Then while Mike did a pre-trip check of the truck, I walked the girls.
“What in the world happened to the side mirrors?” Mike asked when I got back.
And it clicked in my head. “So that’s what it was!” and I told Mike what had happened in the night.
“I had my foot on the button that adjusts the mirrors, huh?”
“I guess so!”
“When I tried to fix it, it clicked for a long time before it finally moved.”
Pennsylvania had some road work going on too. Maybe road work isn’t quite the right way to say it but what they were doing was building these berms on either side of the bridge overpasses between the east and westbound lanes.
“Do so many people drive off those things that they have to do that?” I wondered out loud. As we kept heading east I saw that some of these berms have been in place for so long that they have mature trees growing from them. I’m sure I’ve noticed them before but never gave them any thought.
We arrived at our Pennsylvania Mountain Home in mid afternoon. As we drove down the dirt road I put the window down and let the girls hang out. Ginger really enjoys this; Itsy? Not so much. But she will stick her head out for a few minutes.
At the mill we backed our trailer full of treasures into one of the barns and dropped it. Mike wanted to find a motel but I wanted to check out the mill. He turned on the lights and the water and I wanted to spend the night there rather than get a motel, until I remembered there were no washrags and only one towel for a shower. That and the place really needed a good cleaning before we stayed in it.
We were shutting things back down when Mike said, “Lookie here.”
“Where?” I questioned.
“In the trash can.”
I walked over and looked and there in the bottom of a thirty gallon trash can were three beautiful kittens, fat and sassy, with eyes clean and clear! That was the first thing I noticed about them; their eyes. We have had a virus at the mill that affects kittens. Their eyes get all goopy and their noses run and they sneeze and sneeze and sneeze! It isn’t usually fatal though.
“How do we get rid of it?” I asked our vet when it first started happening.
“You can’t have any cats there for five years,” came the answer.
Well, that wasn’t really an option for us. We wanted to have cats to keep the mice down plus Mike is a big cat lover. I don’t understand that, but whatever. Me? I like kittens. In subsequent research I found out that the cats would eventually build up an immunity toward it. In the meantime, we cleaned kitten eyes with a mild solution of boric acid and kept them sheltered and fed. We provide for our clowder even when we can’t be there. Over the years more kittens were born healthy than sick and here was a litter with all healthy ones.
I struggled with myself on what to do about the kittens; help them out of the trash can or leave them be. The mother was taking good care of them and there was a rabbit foot in the can, a left over from one of their meals, I’m sure. I thought maybe I would pick one of the kittens up but they had other ideas about that. As soon as I started to reach in they were all spit and fur and needle sharp kitten teeth and claws. They were born there in the darkness of the mill and even the lights had to be scary for them, let alone a strange looking giant!
“Well, if I hadn’t of been there, the mother would have to get the kittens out on her own,” I reason to my mother on the phone that night. “Or maybe they will be able to jump out before long. They looked to be between six and eight weeks old.”
“I’m sure.” Momma is very supportive.
“I guess if I get back and there are three dead kittens in the bottom of the can, I made the wrong decision.”
“There’ll be more kittens next year,” Momma says and that’s the practical side of her. She doesn’t like to see critters suffer and die unnecessarily either.
Our conversation moved on. “Patti took me shopping for some new blouses yesterday,” she told me.
“Yeah?”
“Yes! And I got some pretty blouses too!”
“Yeah?” I said again.
Momma mused. “I didn’t really need them, the ones I have are still good enough for around the house, but when I go out I like to look a little bit nicer.”
“I know how you feel,” I commiserated. “I’m kinda the same way.”
“Peggy, they are so pretty! And they make me feel pretty too.”
“I know, right!” And I truly do know. “Clothes that fit well do make you look better and feel better. “You should have Patti take a picture so I can see’em.”
Later that day my phone dings. I recognized the sound as meaning I got a new text message. I picked it up and see Patti sent me this picture of my beautiful Momma. Immediately I called her. “You look beautiful Momma!”
“Thank you sweetheart,” she says and I love the way she says sweetheart when calls me that.
I forwarded the picture to our son Kevin and asked him to send it to my email. I wanted to show it to you and I don’t have any way to get it off my archaic flip phone; I still have to hit the number 7 four times to get an ess when I’m texting!
Momma just turned 85, doesn’t she look fabulous!
“Peg, isn’t your mother on oxygen full time?” you ask. “Did she take the hose off for the picture?”
No, actually, someone may have been fooling with the picture a little and edited out her umbilical cord, as I call her oxygen hose.
So! We are at our Mountain Home and we have the trailer put away. “Should we call the Kipps and tell them we’re here?” I asked Mike.
“The Kipps are gone this weekend,” he told me.
“How about Jon and Steph? Do you wanna see if they want to have dinner with us?”
Mike called but the Robinson’s were busy with Relay For Life, a cancer fund raising event.
“Let’s go see if we can get our rental car,” Mike suggested.
We were going to spend Friday night with the Robinson’s and Kipp’s, get a room, pick up the rental car on Saturday morning, tuck Big Red into the barn beside the trailer and head back to Missouri. But we had arrived ahead of schedule, Kipp’s were gone, Robinson’s were busy, there was no reason to hang around and there was still time to get to the rental car place before they closed.
Mike had reserved a mini van so we would have plenty of room, and they assured us that with a couple of days notice they would have one for us. We called a couple of days in advance and they said no problem.
Yeah.
On our trip east we got a call from the rental car place.
“We can’t get you a van. How about a Jeep Cherokee?”
“I guess,” Mike said.
The rental car place was in Wysox, fourteen miles from our little town of Wyalusing and we headed over there. They didn’t have it. Since our scheduled pick up was Saturday, the guy that works on Saturday was going to bring it with him in the morning.
“I’ll just give him a call and see if we can get you going,” Jay, the young man taking care of us, said and called the guy.
Guess what?
No Jeep Cherokee either. He was bringing some other car.
“It’s smaller and will be cheaper for you.”
Mike didn’t care as much about cheap as he did comfort. “How about that Chevy Trax right there?” he asked pointing to a medium size car sitting in the parking lot in front of us.
“Sure. That one just came in but I think it’s ready to go. How many days do you want it for?”
“We should be home in two days but we better say three just to be safe. What happens if we return it early?” Mike asked.
“We’ll credit you back that day.”
“What if it’s on a Sunday?”
“We’re closed here on Sunday’s. If someone calls and says they’ll return it by a certain time on Sunday, one of us will swing by to make sure it’s here. Then we won’t charge them for that day. That’s how we do it here.”
Then, if all of that wasn’t bad enough, they had issues with their credit card system. Every time Jay hit the button to fix the time it added another day to our rental. More days equals more money. Twenty minutes later he had it resolved and we signed the papers.
“No smoking and no pets,” Jay said as we were checking out the car. “If there is any evidence of that, there’ll be a one hundred dollar cleaning fee.”
“No pets!” you exclaim. “How are you going to get Itsy and Ginger home?”
Mike discussed the issue with them up front. “If they are small and don’t make a mess, we don’t really say anything.”
Mike drove Big Red and I followed in the Trax and we headed fourteen miles back to Wyalusing to transfer our luggage and get the truck put away.
“Do you want to stay in Wyalusing or Wysox?” I asked Mike.
“Let’s stay at the Wyalusing Hotel but I want to stay in the new part.”
I called and was told that they only allow pets in the old part.
“Let’s go to Wysox then,” Mike said.
I thought most hotels and motels were pet friendly, but I have no idea why I thought that. This trip has certainly given me an education on that! Now that I had a heads-up I called first.
“Yes, we take pets,” the Comfort Inn said, “But there is an extra 27.50 charge for that.”
We headed to Wysox and once on the Golden Mile, as they call their main street, we happen on the Fairfield Inn, another motel chain.
“You wanna stop at this one?” Mike asked.
“I don’t care,” and we stopped there first.
“I’m sorry, we don’t allow any animals except service animals,” we were told.
Back in the car we go for the short drive to the Comfort Inn. As we pulled in we were surprised at the almost empty parking lot. There were three motorcycles and two cars, that was it, and you know at least one of those cars belonged to the help.
Beth, the lady that checked us in, was so nice. “We can’t understand it,” she said. “They get all the business and they’re more expensive!”
After the hard night in the truck the night before, we both went to sleep early and slept soundly in the king size bed and air conditioning.
To Be Continued…
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