Meijer and the Casablanca ending

per my 23July2008 post, I mentioned we had built a house. we bought our original cottage (that sounds nicer that it was) in spring of 1999. it was a 1000 sq./ft home, built in 1947, sitting on just under an acre of property. when my husband and I first toured the, ahem--house, we thought the same thing, love the land/location, HATE the house.

well, we lived in that one bathroom (absolute disaster when the clay sewer line fell apart), leaky roof, musty crawl space, anciently wired (Ben Franklin technology), literal holes in the wall, oven in the summer, freezer in the winter, place for 7 years. our solace during those years were the 20+ mature shade trees, our very own "on goldfish pond," and planning/researching the best options for building...some day.

a bit hard to imagine how Meijer fits into this post, isn't it?

november 2006:

it's 8:45 am, my builder has just told me the sections of our home would arrive later that afternoon, but they still didn't have a big enough empty lot to "store" the sections of our home overnight.

see, all those years of planning and research led us to the modular home. no, not a mobile home, but a modular home. a modular home is built in sections (5 in our case), built indoors, wrapped, and all sections are delivered to the building site. just a few of the benefits are: no building materials damaged/delayed by weather, amazingly short construction period (from the day we signed the loan documents to the day we moved in was 5 months!), at arrival/assembly the home is 85% complete (reducing number of sub-contractors to deal with) and it is a very energy efficient home.

6 stressful hours later, my builder called. "we've found a lot to store the sections, we'll see you at 8am tomorrow to set your house!" soooo relieved, I head to Meijer to buy all of the food for our "assembling the house party" we are hosting for our neighbors, friends and home building workers. that particular Meijer jaunt was the stuff of legends. I flew through the gi-normous store, buzzed through the check-out lane, dodged cars in the parking lot like a vintage game of frogger, stuffed my car with noisy, plastic-thin bags of groceries and pointed my honda towards the nearest exit, Meijer's wide-open-west parking lot. giddy up!

sccrrreeeech! (supposed to be the literary equivalent of the sound my brakes made when I spasmodically double-footed the brake pedal. I'm clarifying because the "ch" sound at the end of the word just doesn't quite ring true with the actual sound of my brakes--and as you know, I'm all about literary integrity. tee hee!)

a deluge of amazement, shock, difficult to breathe-ness, (and that slight quiver/cold feeling I get when all my blood inexplicably attempts to squeeze into my pinky toe) broke out over my already frazzled nervous system. this is what caused my Treasure Island-like apoplexy...

of all the parking lots in all the towns in all the world, my house parks at Meijer.

who knows, maybe there's still time for a beautiful friendship...maybe.