Disaster, Disaster, New Computer

Last Saturday, 5:00 a.m. woke up to Mr. Jewels asking if I'd like to go swimming in the basement. Our water softener, which, by the way, we had just fixed after years of not having it work, overfilled and spilled out during the night. A tube had come loose. We filled up buckets and buckets of water and watched as the things that had been floating around finally find solid ground. Second disaster...went to help a sister-in-law and her roommate pick up some mattresses for their new apartment 45 minutes away from where we live. Having been told that these were twin mattresses I left home with a tarp and some string and I mean string, not rope, that Mr. Jewels had handed me. They were not twin mattresses, they were full size, two mattresses, two box springs loaded into my small and old Nissan pickup truck. Strapped down with tarp and string I headed onto the freeway to make it back to their place. As I was heading onto the freeway going 40 mph, I see in the rearview mirror the tarp and top mattress fly across 4 lanes of traffic, not hitting a single vehicle and land in the left hand side meridian. I called Highway Patrol to assist me in getting this mattress. He comes and tells me that we are going to get up to speed and dart across the lanes over to the left meridian and then back up to where the mattress is and load it back onto the truck. I suppose I had a look of terror on my face because he said "no, that's too dangerous." After some phone calls to family to come help, we tied down the remaining beds with actual rope and headed back home going 40 mph all the way, leaving behind a good mattress for someone else's lucky day. And now I get to type this post on a brand new computer, this is a first for me.