Brain Freeze

For Alisa's recent birthday she asked if we could get a chest freezer to accompany our food storage efforts. We did some research on the web to determine the best freezer for our price range. We ultimately decided that we would be purchasing our new freezer from Lowes. (This is as far as our planning ahead took us.)

We dropped the kids off with the sitter and wanted to quickly purchase our freezer before moving on to enjoy a relaxing dinner together. We soon learned however there would be nothing quick or relaxing about our evening.

We arrived at Lowes and found the freezer we wanted. An employee was quick to arrive and answer some of our questions. It was immediately evident that this new freezer would not fit into either of our compact cars, so one of our more urgent questions to the employee was cost of delivery options. We were given three choices:

1. Figure out a way to get it home yourself
2. Rent a Lowes truck for $20 + gas
3. Pay the $79.00 delivery fee

Wanting to be as frugal as possible, we decided to call in a favor from a friend and borrow his family's Chevy Suburban. I made the phone call, and soon we were on our way. We stopped at a gas station along the way to pick him up some "thank-you treats." He was gracious and we quickly left in his suburban...with one catch. His wife was participating with an Enrichment activity at a nearby meeting house and his newborn daughter was hungry. So after dropping off his newborn child we were now on our way back to Lowes.

However, we traveled about 1 mile before the "low fuel" light switched on in the car. Realizing that there was plenty of gas in the car, but not wanting to return the car with the light on, we stopped at the same gas station to put $5 bucks into the beast. Now we headed to Lowes to pick up our freezer.

We made our way back to the appliance section and found a new worker to assist us. We pointed out the one we were ready to purchase, and then he said, "I will go make sure we have one in stock." It was then that it dawned on us, we didn't know if they even had one in stock. We waited around for about 10 minutes before he returned and said that he had one, and was ready to help us with our purchase. We made our purchase and he rolled the new freezer out into the parking lot where our borrowed Chevy was waiting.

It was at this moment I realized there was a good chance this new freezer would not fit into the back of this Suburban. Sure enough we lifted the freezer into the back only to find that the rear doors would not completely close. He suggested removing the car seats and the bench so we could slide it all the way in. Being an Eagle Scout I determined the better idea was to get some twine and just tie the rear doors closed. We did this and then drove slowly home with all of the dome lights in the car shining down on us.

The freezer made it safely home. We unloaded the freezer into the garage, and as we began to pull away to go retrieve our car, Alisa pointed out that we had forgotten to close our garage. We stopped again, closed the garage, and as we pulled out of our driveway a second time, the "low gas" light turned on again. We ignored the light and finally traded out the large Suburban for our nice little Civic.

At this point our night had already lasted longer than anticipated. Not wanting our sitter to be stuck with tired/grouchy kids who would need to go to bed soon, we opted for a local restaurant. We had a nice evening at Porter's Restaurant on main street in Lehi and had some good laughs about the adventure we had gone through to get a new freezer for some future "on-sale" ice-cream purchase!