One of the guards came by to check on me. He didn't speak much English, but he knew the word wow. I think that sums it up. I have bumped many a curb and flattened many a tire, but I've never seen anything quite like this before.
My biggest immediate concern though was that Young was waiting for me to come pick her up, which I now could not do. Luckily, I was still in Nichada, so help was just a phone call away. Two of my neighbors came to rescue me and Elena, and then we all drove to get Young.
One of my friends has a guy who helps her with car troubles, so I gave him a call. He put the spare tire on, brought the car back to our house, and gave us his assessment. It turns out we had one kind of tire on the front of our car and another kind on the back. My new tire friend gave us some replacement options, and once we had decided what we wanted, called his friend who has a garage to make an appointment to bring our car in the next day. He showed up again the next evening, took the car and brought it back with four new tires. The good news is that his services cost about $15. The bad news is that he said our brake pads are down to 20%, so we'll need to use his services again to fix those.
After all the excitement Tuesday, I was hoping that Wednesday could be a calm study day. No such luck. We had people coming by the house all morning. They were coming to do helpful things like fix a broken bathroom fan, measure the stairs for a baby gate, and hang our pictures, but it felt like I barely sat down before the doorbell rang again.
After doing some picture hanging research, I found out that our moving company would send people to hang the pictures at no additional charge. One of my neighbors used them and said they did a great job, so I scheduled an appointment. Three guys showed up, a manager and two workers. They were awesome. The manager spoke English, so he helped with interpretation and picture height. The other two did measuring and banging. They did a great job centering the paintings and putting them at the heights I asked for. They also had the special drywall screws for some of the heavier pictures, and they popped them into the wall, no muss, no fuss.
After they left, I golf carted it over to the mall to get cash for my fabulous new tires, and then met up with the magazine editorial crew for lunch at ISB. By the time I got back from lunch, I just wanted to lay down and take a nap, but Vivi got home from school and tutoring needed to happen, so I pushed on through.
Thursday was a perfect studying day. Young took over Elena care, and I just worked on my week's readings and response assignments. It was heavenly.
I was hoping today could be like that too, but we had to go to the grocery store in our car with fancy new tires, but not so fancy brakes (I left plenty of space between me and the car in front of me for gradual deceleration). That always takes a chunk of time out of the morning.
In the afternoon, when Vivi got home from school, she told me that I had forgotten that today was library day, and so she hadn't brought back her books and wasn't allowed to check out new ones. I pointed out to her that she was the one who went to school every day, not me, so she should be the one to remember library day. Despite my outward firmness, I felt bad. There's no school next week, and I wanted to make sure she had books for vacation, so we collected up her library books and got in the golf cart to head back to school.
It actually ended up being a fun Mommy Vivi outing. We went to the snack booth and I got a chocolate chip cookie for her and a strawberry banana smoothie for me (of course she drank most of it). We also stopped by her classroom because she had left one of her library books in her reading bin. While we were there, she proudly showed me the stories she has been working on. Then we went to the library to get new books. She had to take a moment to enjoy the circle windows, so of course I had to capture it.
Once we got home, we had to get ready for one of our neighbor's fourth birthday party. His mom had told kids that they could wear their Halloween costumes, so Vivian had on her Elsa costume and left a trail of glitter wherever she went.
Most of the neighborhood kids were there, so Vivi had a great time playing, and I had a great time talking to the other parents. I had to take a picture of the cake.
When I showed it to Jeff, he declared it awesome, so I guess it's a guy thing. It tasted good, and everyone had a great time, so it was definitely a successful party. It was a nice way to end a crazy week.
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