Weeks like this make Hammerhaid miss his pickup truck.
So if he misses it so much, why did he get rid of it?
“W-h-h-h-hale, I was tired of not having any space to haul folks around. It was a basic truck with two seats. Didn’t have a jump seat or an extended cab, so I could just haul myself and another,” he explained.
There’s got to be more to it than that. Why not keep it when he got a car?
“Guess I am a cheapskate,” H-man grinned. “Paying for insurance, car tags and all that stuff adds up quick.”
Ok, but there’s got to be more behind his story ....
“Alright, alllllll-r-r-r-r-right,” he grunted. “When you have a pickup truck, you are always having to haul somebody’s stuff around. You either got to loan it to them or do the actual hauling yourself. After helping a passel of folks move, it was getting old,” he said.
Now, Hammerhaid finds himself in the same boat as all those folks and having to beg and borrow a truck.
That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when people hold your driving suspect. Yup, it’s ugly but true.
And that is especially true when it comes to moving a ton of stuff like last Saturday.
Hmmmmmm, let’s call it spring cleaning ...
Betty Lou had been working long and hard for weeks (maybe months or years?) to clear up and out some of Hammerhaid’s stuff. (She calls it junk and trash.)
There was so much that a normal pickup would require endless loads, so they decided to rent what H-man calls a “U-Haul-It.” That way it would only be necessary to make two trips ... one to the dump and one to storage.
Hammerhaid was “intrigued” by the huge bags filled with mysterious stuff from his “collection.”
“What’s in here?” he asked Betty Lou.
“Well, it’s a bit like that military code,” she said.
“What military code?” Hammerhaid asked.
“The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ one. You aren’t supposed to ask what’s in those bags and in return I won’t tell you. It’s for you own good,” she insisted.
Naturally, that got him interested in the bags’ contents.
In an attempt to end the endless whining, Betty Lou let him look into two bags picked by random. The first was a cardboard box filled with broken, twisted and genuinely unusable coat hangers. The second was a collection of outdated catalogs.
“OK, you’ve got to stop looking and load all this stuff on the truck to take to the recycling bins,” she insisted.
Yep, Betty Lou had separated the recyclables from the pure unusable junk. And Hammerhaid was soon wondering why they didn’t rent a taller truck instead of a cargo van. Yep, banging his head against the van’s lower ceiling 20 or 30 times still didn’t teach him to duck.
But still, they managed to get the van loaded for the trip to the dump, oops, recycling center.
Oops, again. The center didn’t open until 9 a.m. That development aggravated Betty Lou, but gave H-haid a little loafing time. He twiddled with the radio, read all the guides to the van and rubbed his sore noggin while Betty Lou tuned him out.
Once it was open, the efficient city workers made the unloading job a quick one, and Betty Lou was soon driving back to the house. Nope, Hammerhaid didn’t get to drive.
That wasn’t due to his driving skills, it was due to Betty Lou missing her old van ... another vehicle they probably should have kept despite it having a few hundred thousand miles on it, not to mention a bad transmission.
Back home, the loading began in earnest and the dynamic duo soon had the rental van all packed up and ready to roll. The only bad thing about getting loaded was having to unload it and arrange it neatly when they got to their designation.
But they made it with time to spare. Only then did Hammerhaid discover the hardest part of his duty was sweeping out the back of the van while bending over and not hitting his head. That was tough!
Finally it was over and Hammerhaid was ready for bed. Unfortunately, it was only a few minutes past 1 p.m. and there were more spring-cleaning projects to go. Yep, another weekend of them this week.
Dang, where’s that snow when we need it?
T-t-t-t-that’s r-r-r-r-r-right. |
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