Berck and I spent the night at the new house last night. I had to literally make our bed. We got up and fortified ourselves on salt & vinegar potato chips, the breakfast of champions, and set to work on the car.

Berck decided to get some sanding pads to clean the gasket sealer off the top of the engine block, since our scrubbing with carburetor cleaner had only marginal results. The rest of the contents of the storage units arrived after noon, and the house got a lot fuller with disassembled furniture and unpacked boxes. It also meant the appearance of the drill press, so Berck could drill through the stud stumps in the catalytic converter. The only problem is that we couldn’t find the chuck key to change the drill bit. We searched through all the boxes marked workshop but to no avail. Finally, I went out to Lowes to try to buy a new one. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any big enough. So I found a Home Depot; they had larger ones, but I was still 1/16th inch short. I looked at the drill press they had on display, pulled its chuck key off the side of it, and thought about putting it in my pocket and walking out with it.

I informed Berck of my failure when I returned. He called his dad, who said he would look for one at Sears. A little later he returned with success. He had gone into the Home Depot and told them his drill press he had just gotten didn’t have a chuck key, so they went in the back and gave him one. I guess if they won’t sell you one they might give one to you.

The end result is that we don’t have to buy a new catalytic converter. All of the stuff we ordered has arrived except for the stuff we called in this morning. Berck called the guy at the machine shop who told him to “check wi’ me mawr e’nin,” and he told him, “Hmm, at’ll be MAWR e’nin.”

Grandmother decided that she absolutely had to move into the new house today, despite not having a bed yet. So now the thermostat is turned to 80 degrees. We closed the vent to our room and will probably sleep with the window open. After Berck cleared an area of her room of boxes and inflated an air mattress for her, she asked Berck’s dad, “I thought you said you had a comforter I could use?” He set up a TV for her in there and gave her a quilt.

Yesterday Berck’s dad took her to the doctor for a persistent cough she’s got that she’s been complaining about constantly. When the doctor came in to see them and asked how she was feeling, she smiled and answered, “Oh, just fine!” When they left, Berck’s dad asked her if the doctor had given her anything for her cough. “No, he just said if it wasn’t gone in a week to come back and see him.”

Berck’s dad is a physician himself, so he was furious that he’d gone through the trouble of taking her to the doctor if he wasn’t even going to do anything to treat her symptoms. Berck and I went over to Aunt Robin’s house last night to meet his dad to go out to dinner, and I popped in to say hi to grandmother. She asked if I could do her a favor and gave me a prescription and a $20 bill (because clearly I’d have time to fill it on the way for the three of us to go out to eat but her son hadn’t on the way home from the doctor’s visit). “I just don’t want to bother him,” she said.

Berck’s dad rolled his eyes when I told him this and complained to the pharmacist, when we stopped at a Walgreen’s after supper, that this was a waste of time, filling a prescription for a placebo. We got back, and Berck’s dad took the prescription back to his mom. He came out of her room furious. “You know what she just told me? ‘I forgot to tell you…’ The doctor gave her a cortisone shot.”