Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Slice of Life Tuesday: Moments Turn into Hours


We had our Saturday all planned. It was to be a rather relaxing day just sitting by the pool. Then, life happened!  On Friday, I had decided to open our patio umbrella to give us some shade as we were to eat lunch on the patio later. As I cranked the handle just one more little tug, it came off in my hand.  There I was with an umbrella crank broken with no hope of fixing it.  Well, for the moment it was fine. The umbrella was up and was staying that way. No problem.  That is until we would eventually close it...

So, our project on Saturday was in the morning, run out to Home Depot and pick up another umbrella.  I was even thinking... how nice, it will be on sale probably!  As we asked for directions to the patio furniture, the worker pointed to a small amount of items in the middle of an aisle. That was all they had.  Well, one of the items was an umbrella. We looked it over but we weren't sure it would fit exactly. 

We left and decided to travel 20 miles to the next large town and go to a few of the bigger stores there: Home Depot, Lowes, Menards.  We went from store to store...nothing!  By now it is past noon and we were hungry so we stopped for lunch then returned home...without an umbrella.

Later that night, after checking online options, we decided to go back and get the original umbrella we had seen that morning. We checked it out and brought it home.  After my husband worked and worked to get it up and working he came inside.

"I think you need to come out and see this, " he said.  I followed him out and he explained that the umbrella was great except for one thing.  The tilt button on the pole did not work. So the umbrella would be straight up in the air and then all of a sudden take a dip to one side or the other. After trying and trying to fix it, we finally gave up and boxed it up to return to the store.

We are back to our old umbrella...still open ALL the time until we get the new one ordered and hopefully set up successfully.  So, much for a nice relaxing day by the pool!

2 comments:

  1. Well, at least you got lunch out. :-) You just never know where life will take you. Plans are great, but sometimes they just don't happen.

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  2. Ha - this reminds me of the graduation party we gave in May for our youngest daughter. It was a beautiful day, but very sunny, so we definitely needed our umbrella open on our deck. Lo and behold, as I was cranking it up, it BROKE! I was so frustrated! After some passive aggressive "encouragement," my husband took on the job of fixing it right before the party. I know it was the last thing he wanted to do! He recruited my father, too, who also didn't really want to stand out in the hot sun fixing the umbrella. After a few trips to Home Depot and lots of sweat equity, they had it up and working. LOL.

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