Stick a Steak Knife in It, It's Done.

Well, the actual move went really well. We packed up various cars with boxes and small things before the truck arrived. Once the truck arrived the guys moved pretty quickly and the living room and kitchen were gone. The next trip saw the basement including the behemoth toy cupboard go and finally the bedrooms came over. We were done with the moving truck by 3pm and we dismissed Lyle, Jeff, Arn, and Steph. The rest of us (Jeannette, Gretchen, Gordon, Megan, mom, and I) kept working and we made a few more trips to the old house. Jeannette left a little while later. We got the TVs and the computer hooked up but we had no cable and no phone line, so we were pretty much dead in the water. We were all exhausted and after a quick trip to Cici's we turned in early. I decided to sleep on mom's brand new queen size elevated Aero bed in the basement and problem started right away.

First it blew up funny; there seemed to be a large bump on the bottom running down the middle of the bed which caused it to rock back a forth. I perched myself directly in the middle and tried to sleep. It was then that I realized that I was freezing cold. I only had one blanket on, but I would have to get out from under that one blanket in order to get more. I decided on a different path; I crawled into bed with mom. When I reported to her how uncomfortable the bed was she decided to return it to QVC and I went down to deflate it. I hit the "quick release" button and got a satisfactory woosh of air and went off to do something else. When I came back a little while later half of the bed (the top half) was still inflated. So I laid on it and rolled it, but nothing seemed to be happening. Gordon came over to help and we got a little bit of air out but not nearly enough. We worked on that damn bed for hours with Megan, Gordon, and I pulling off all manor of contortions trying to release the air from the damn bed. We tried to call the help number left by Aero in the box and were told "Due to high volume your call may be delayed up 10 minutes or more; at that time we will disconnect the call." I was on my cell, since mom did not have phone service yet, so I disconnected the call myself and went back to the bed. We tried customer service at QVC but were unable to get to a person to explain our dilema. We were able to get on-line (another long story) and I went to the QVC site and started a live chat with a "real" person. I explained our problem and she said to try to loosen the valve. I did not know what that means so I explained that the valve was fully open but no air was coming out. She said that once we deflated the bed we could certainly return it. I retorted "short of sticking it with a steak knife, we would not be able to get it back into the box." She said "that may be what you need to do." That was all I needed to hear, we went back down to the basement, cut a hole in the damn thing and still spent another half hour trying to fold it into a bundle small enough to fit in our biggest box. I did a screen shot of the "live chat" so that I would have a record of someone telling me that it was OK to kill the beast.

We have had many more adventures today from the cable company ("we can't drill holes and connect TVs mam") to the phone company ("well, you are scheduled for today so it should be done by Thursday"). We lost the hardware to all of the hanging stuff in mom's kitchen (you know how she loves her mushroom drawer) but then we found it again. I drilled about 16 holes for two screws but the damn drawer is up. We returned a giant cabinet and a small TV. We bought lumber and drawer organizers. We got almost everything unpacked on the first floor (leaving only the basement) and it really looks like a home. Mom is very happy (when she isn't terribly frustrated) and the house is wonderful.