So. Where Was I?

Oh yeah.

Monday morning came and the lingering smoke from the night before had pretty much cleared. There was still a slight tinge of burned bean odor in the air, but for the most part things seemed pretty good. I went to work, arriving at 6:15 a.m. We do 4 10-hour days in the summer. I owe 2 weeks and a day to the district. But I'll be dragging those days out for a quite a while, as I planned to take a day or so here and there to visit with my sister and to work the primary election for Cassie.

Mom and Dad said good-bye to us Sunday night, planning to head out of their campground early Monday morning to begin the trek back home to Minnesota.

I started in with the post-school clean-up and shut-down. This necessitates quite a bit of running around the building and also a lot of file-shuffling in our records vault. The vault is nice. It's quiet and there are no phones in there. Unfortunately, there is no cellular signal in there, either. So whenever I've been in there a while, I go back to my desk to check my cell and my desk phone to see if there were calls.

At 8:30 I happened to be at my desk when my cell rang. It was Dad. "We are at Food Lion," he said. "The brakes aren't working on the camper. Do you think your mechanic can help us?"

I called Derek Patterson and told his receptionist the situation. They said they'd take Dad right away and I knew if they couldn't fix the problem, they'd get him to the right place. So I sent Dad up the road about a mile and went back to the vault.

A couple of hours later I checked messages and had one from Dad saying they were stuck at the mechanic and couldn't get back to our house. They needed a ride and couldn't find Nate. The message was 2 hours old. Hmmm. So I called and they had finally found him and were back at my house. They needed to take it to an RV repair place in Charlotte and didn't have a way to get it up there. So called my friend Steve, who is a home handyman. He was around and they did some more diagnosing and testing. Mom and Dad ended up staying until Wednesday morning getting it all done.

During all this time I was getting text messages from Julia saying they were stuck at the airport in Minneapolis. Needed a new plane. Then needed flight attendants. I never understand why flight attendants can't just go to the new plane with the passengers. I told her not to worry about being late getting here...I'd given her bed to Mom and Dad!

So as you can imagine Monday night was pretty chaotic. Everyone was here and I don't even remember what we fed them all. I'm glad Mom and Dad stayed a couple of days. They hadn't seen Julia since February, so they caught up a bit.

Tuesday morning, however, I had an emergency with Bear that really shook me up for a while.