Friday, Leaving

Mom (and I) got up early this morning -- 6:00 AM -- to get ready for her skin cancer surgery at 8:00. It took 4 hours, but went fine. Afterwards, we went to the Original House of Pancakes for breakfast (and lunch).

Afterwards, we stopped at Fred Meyer for some bandages, and food for her for a couple of days.

Now I am trying to finish everything off before leaving, to drive up to Sue's.

This may be my last message until I get home to Texas.

Thursday, Wrapping up

I took Mom's income tax forms over to the Post Office and mailed them, and a load of cardboard over to the recycling center. I hope I kept those two straight! This left the garage clean.

We got a call that the bathtub support had arrived, so we went down and picked it up. It was very easy to install.

We had dinner with John and Karen. A very pleasant dinner and good conversation. John looked at the sports cards when we got home; he says most of them are worthless.

I'm mostly packed and ready to go. It's a good thing that Mom's bathroom scale is handy -- I need to make sure my bags are under 50 pounds. I think the books are a significant weight. Moving about 4 or 5 books from one suitcase to another was an 8 pound shift. I've got one at 40 pounds and the other at 44.

Wednesday, UPS and NARVRE

As soon as I got up, I went to the UPS store, to mail the boxes of bottles to Canada. This experience illustrates why I don't like working with UPS. From the web site, it should have cost $110.77. But when I get there with that printed out, he explains that I could get that price if I went to the UPS shipping warehouse directly, but since this is a UPS store, it will cost more -- about $125. Even tho I had told the web site that I would be shipping from a UPS store.

But since we had targetted about $160 for shipping, I figured I could improve the packing and stay within our guidelines, so I suggested that we put one of the boxes inside another UPS box, to give it extra cushioning and safety.

Then he explains that even tho I am paying for extra insurance to cover breakage, and they are accepting the box that if it breaks at the other end, they will disallow the breakage, since it is a customer pack, and they will just say it was badly packed, not their fault, no insurance.

But if we put it in a slightly bigger box, that makes the box exceed a limit in size, and the price jumps to $182 for shipping.

However, he could take the box, and repack it so that everything was well protected. That would cost more for the box and the packing, but be able to fit in a smaller box and get under the size limit. I figure I can trade off the better box and packing for the cost in shipping, and agree.

He goes off, and comes back. Now it's still $182 for the shipping, but with $28 for the box and shipping, so its over $200. So we go from $110 on the web to over $210 at the store. They just ratchet the price up and up given any opportunity.

When Mom got up, we went to the NARVRE meeting. A pleasant lunch, with a bunch of retired railroad workers.

Then downtown for Mom to get her new (to her) wedding ring. She had it resized from its original 6.5 down to a 5.0. To my way of thinking it still looked a bit large, but they said to try it for a little while.

Stopped to get Mom's refilled prescriptions, then home to walk Blue around the block.

Then there was another drawer of inventory to go thru. Turned out not to be too bad.