HELP I'VE FALLEN IN (love with) TUSCANY AND I CAN'T GET UP

The Amazing Hot Tub Saga Part 1

   I went back to work the last week of August and tried to keep my nose to the grind stone.  Amazingly enough I decided to take on another project, besides school and church music.  Our friends Myana and Leonard found us a free “like new” hot tub.  All we had do to was move it (by means of a crane!), clear the grass by the patio, level it, weed guard it, gravel it, pour a concrete slab, get a 220 electrical hook up run from the breaker box, place it on the slab, fill it and turn it on.  Easy.   Right?   And like the gullible oaf I am, I said yes.  Thus began the “Amazing Free Hot Tub” story.

     Leonard, Stinky as he has come to be affectionately called, can drive anything and build nearly everything.  His stories of driving trucks, manufacturing trailers for semis, and drinking, will go down in the annals of “the most incredible feats ever attempted” for posterity.  Leonard can take anything and make something from it.  He can buy ‘junker’ trucks, repair or dismantle them and turn a healthy profit.  He never needs to buy new.  Ever.  Except when Myana puts her foot down and says, “No, if we’re getting new appliances for the kitchen, we are getting new ones.  He is amazing—he can be a Safeway at the right time every week to get the reduced items before they are picked.  He gets all his meats, wines, you name like that.  I can’t believe his luck and cleverness.

     Stinky's and Myana’s hot tub was also free.  Of course, he did have to haul it himself, create a deck and steps, repair the pump motor, and various other things, but it is up and running and used nightly if not weekly.  The couple has even dabbled in wine making:  Finding all the carbuncles, and other assorted apparatus to turn their crushes Marechal Foch grapes into a potent brew.  They even named their brand, “Flamingo Farms”.  I painted the label for them.  Flamingos are part of a funny incident that happened on their wedding day.   During the reception at their house, a UPS truck showed up with six huge boxes, which got stacked in the middle of their ‘cozy’ front room with a hundred guests.  Inside:  20 pink plastic flamingo lawn ornaments—sent by her ex-boy friend as a wedding ‘present’.  The pink bird on the label is a humorous reminder to us all of that day.

     Now, the only rough part of getting this free hot tub was we had to remove it from the owner’s deck and get it into our yard.  Simple—right?  Wrong.  The 8’ by 8’, 3 ½ foot tub was sitting behind the woman’s garage.  Did I mention she lives on the uphill side of one of the steepest hills in Roseburg?  Did I also mention that the garage is two stories high and the deck is 15 to 20 feet above the driveway’s retaining wall?  The only way to get this tub is with a crane--a really big crane.  Leonard was positive he could get the tube out without a ‘scratch’.   Umm.  Did this have disaster written all over it?  I hoped not.

    At one of our impromptu dinner parties, after the multi-course dinner, with great home grown vegetables, a grilled rare flank steak, and more bottles of wine than six people have a right to drink the idea was born. The plan was conceived, hatched and given ‘wings’:  Stinky and our friend Doug, a contractor, mapped out for us exactly what would happen when, what they would do, and what I had to do.  First I had to clear a 12’ by 12’ section of grass, and fill it with gravel.  “How am I going to get that done?”  Between us we have three trucks, so no problem.  You just have to use your wheel barrow and get it around to the back of your house.  Fine, I thought.  I was no stranger to a little hard physical labor.  I did my whole back yard that way.  Okay, what about pouring the slab?  I did do the slab for the AC unit when Myana and Leonard’s house was ours.  I could mix about 15-20 bags of concrete and pour it a wheel borrow load at a time?  Nope, no, it’s too much concrete, you need a truck.  Oh that will run about $500.  We can’t afford that, we’re saving to go to Italy. 

      “Okay, so I’ll need call for a truck, I guess”. 

     “Not so fast,” says Doug, I know this guy who works for this concrete company and they are always looking for someone or place to ‘drop’ the end of a load.  I’ll get you some concrete.  Trust me”

     “Oh, did I mention that I called the crane guy and he can deliver the tub next Thursday?”

    “Uh, no.”

    “We can just get it off the deck, swing it over the garage roof and set it down on a trailer in the driveway.  Then we’ll haul it over here and set it on its side on a piano dolly.  Then when you get the yard ready and the concrete poured, the tub will be right there to move around to the back.”

     “How many guys is that going to take to move?”

    “Maybe four, those things are light.”

     “Are you sure about all this?”

     “Yeah.  Not problem.  Just don’t worry.  Everything will be just great.”

   I said “okay”, but I was thinking this could be even worse then the time I moved an upright piano across town when I was in college.  I was doing fine, until I had to turn a quick corner into traffic, and quick as quick, the grand old upright grand was pieces and parts. 

     Marianne calls these little forays into the unknown, “The Road to Abilene”.  That’s an older business expression where the administration ‘builds-up’ the workers into a frenzy about doing something that is totally impossible to do, but everybody’s ‘on-board’, and everybody busts their butts to get it done, but because it is an impossible task, it never gets done, and everybody is pissed off that they went through the whole exercises in the first place.  Did I mention the hot tub was free?

     I quickly arranged to get an estimate from an electrician for putting in the 220 conduit.  I spent that Sunday afternoon, and Monday getting the sod removed.  The following Friday I loaded a borrowed pick-up truck with a cubic yard of sod and dirt.  This little Chevy S-10 is great for going to the dump and it’s used by all the neighbors.  Our friend across the street (a retired teacher) is always generous to a fault and even watches our house when we go away. 

     So I head out to the dump in this small truck, did I mention the small bench seat in the tiny cab does not adjust so my knees wrap up around the steering wheel (which is in my chest).  I get to the dump at 4:05 PM and was told that they couldn’t take that much, dirt and sod, and that I had to go up to the landfill.  When the attendant said that, I got a lump in the pit of my stomach.  “The only problem is that they close at 4 PM.  You’ll have to come back in the morning at 8 AM.”  I smiled, thanked the attendant and drove the truck back home.  Grumbling all the way.

     8 AM the next morning I drove the pick-up back out to the land fill.  It was peaceful and still and as I took the loaded down to the axles S-10 up the hill to the ‘landfill’ a family of deer crossed the road about 30 feet ahead and I was happy and ‘one’ with my world.  It’s the yoga practice kicking in.  Once I got to the site, things changed quickly.  Big trucks and graters roared and belched carbonized diesel and the stench of rotting refuse flooded the cab.  I back up to the edge of the pit and got my gloves on and started to unload.  It was at that exact moment that the first really good rain storm in four months hit Douglas County.  The dried sod turned to mud instantly and I was drenched in the skin through three layers of shirts.  The thirsty, dried turf went from light weight, easy to handle chunks to heavy water soaked ‘back-strainers’ in seconds.  I was sure glad that God had given me the ability to appreciate getting absolutely filthy and wet clear through to my sock and underwear.  I guess we sure needed that rain.

     Once I got home and removed all the wet cloths, I found new work cloths and proceeded to empty, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, the gravel from the trailer Leonard had left for me during the week.  It was made even heavier by how much water had mixed with the dirty and rock.  By noon, I was finished.  Really.  I didn’t want to do another thing all day.  I was beat.

    I waited another week for another load of gravel, which I unloaded in a couple of hours.  It goes faster when the rock is dry.  It was then I realized that Stinky had never gotten the crane and the tub wasn’t sitting in the yard by last Thursday.  Maybe something was wrong.  No.  He hadn’t gotten hold of the crane operator yet.  But he said I needed to make sure Doug had the concrete coming, because we were going to build the form for the pad this weekend.  Sounds good, I thought.  Well, no.   Doug hadn’t talked to anyone about the concrete, and he didn’t know when he could.  Great.

     Later that weekend Marianne and I got a chance to go see the hot tub in its nature state, perched high above its surrounding on its hill.  It was a fine looking tub, but it was in a near impossible spot for removing.  I really wondered if a crane operator could be skilled enough to maneuver it out of its remote resting roost.  I asked the owner, an old acquaintance, if she had ever used it.   She said no. 

     “It wasn’t my thing,’ she said.  She had just moved in and wanted the deck space that it took up. 

     “So did it run well when you turned it on?”  I asked.

     “Oh, I hadn’t ever turned it on.” 

     “Oh.”  The sound of a record needle went scraping across the vinyl LP in my mind.  I’m going to get a tub that might not even work.  I smiled, thanked her, and Marianne and I left.  We got in the car and drive down the insanely steep driveway.  We looked at each other and just shook our heads.  Are we idiots or what?

     It had been over a week since I had finished getting the gravel area ready in my back yard.  The lumber for the form was purchased and I was still waiting for Leonard to come with his equipment to help me build the form.  Doug wasn’t returning my calls and his wife, Molly, my church choir accompanist was more concerned about the multiple projects that she had him doing, rather than my concrete pad.  Please, just remind him he was the one who had the connections to get this done for me.  Leonard may show up at my door step with a tub any day now, I pleaded.  I knew full well that getting the tub was also the farthest thing from his mind.

     I came home to an e-mail from Sam Cossa that week:

Dear Dave,
There is so much I could say...  The bottom line is that you are going to have a great time (in Italy).
I would say the best 10 bucks you could spend would be the 2009 edition of Rick Steve’s guide to Italy (he also has separate guides for individual cities and regions).  We found his stuff to be full of all sorts of little details and inside info.
Just a couple of practical matters:  Using your Visa card is the best way to pay for stuff, even at open air markets.  Cash machines are reasonably easy to find.  Don't bring traveler’s checks as there is so much counterfeiting that many places won't take them.  Don't buy any telephone cards here for long distance calls.  Buy them in Italy.  They are sold in many bars and they make it easy to call home from pay phones for dirt cheap.
Also, internet cafes are very plentiful there.

Sam

Ah, something positive to make the passing days preparing for the hot tub.

Yea!