Our big weekend plan

A few weeks ago our nephew Aron graduated Suma Cum Laude with honors from Murray State University, the alma mater of his mother and his Uncle Henry.

This weekend, he will be moving to Mississippi so that he can attend Ole Miss and get his PhD in chemistry.

I really hope that I didn't get those facts confused, but if I did you still get the picture. Anyway, after moving him out of his dorm after graduation, I realized that he didn't really have much stuff. I suppose that's kind of good, but kind of bad. On the good side, it's fast and easy to move him home at the end of the year, things he didn't own were provided,  and he had everything he needed. On the bad side, since he is moving into an apartment (he's had enough of dorm life and I don't blame him) he has pretty much nothing. No bed, no storage, nothing to eat on, nothing to do homework on, and nothing to put his tv on. ;) I asked him what he was going to do about furniture, and he said he really didn't know. That didn't sit well with me. He's a super great guy and works really hard to do well. Given those facts, I decided to make it my personal mission to make sure that he had enough stuff to live comfortably until he can get better stuff. We had a worn out love seat that we decided to contribute. It has a slip cover so it's not so bad anymore, and if he spills beer juice on it he can take the cover off and wash it. I also had an end table to add. I talked to a friend who also had a few things to add. Now I was getting somewhere. I hit the local Goodwills and got him some dishes and such. I had Henry ask around at work and see what he could find. Full size bed, jackpot. I still lacked some clothing storage and maybe a few other things.  My friend who contributed things knew someone who was moving. They lived in what she called "a ritzy neighborhood". This was good, very good. She said they had a desk and a dining table. That was most of my remaining "want" items, leaving me only to find a chest of drawers for his clothes. Henry picked up a U-Haul trailer and hooked it to the van so that we could start gathering the items. We rolled up at the house to pick up the items, and when we went in we found that we had hit the jackpot! She had lots of stuff, nice stuff, that she wanted to give us. She didn't want to move it, they had had it for a while, they got some of it for free at some point anyway, and she wanted it to go to a good home where someone would use it. We scored an extemely heavy desk, a leather chair, a file cabinet with a hutch that I plan for him to use as a chest of drawers/clothing storage, and another filing cabinet that looks like a low dresser that I figure he can put more clothes in and his tv on top of. All of those things looked as though they came from a law office. Super score! The dining table (which also had a matching china cabinet) was too big for him to use, but my friend had a small one so we traded :) On the way out, the jackpot lady added that she had a hutch for the desk, as well as a random (sorta shabby) bookcase in the garage. We carted off those items too. So I headed home with my little trailer filled with goodies and the thought that Aron will have a place to eat, sleep, hang out and study. When Henry got home he unloaded the trailer as I suspected, and we repacked it as tightly as possible including his contrubution of the bed. We ran out of room (shoulda gotten a bigger trailer but we didn't know that we would score so much free stuff) so my table and Goodwill finds ended up in the van and the couch? Well, the couch is tied to the roof of the van like the Clampets. It's going to be a long 4 hour trip (or longer) while towing a U-Haul trailer and trying to keep the kids quiet and happy. On top of that we found out that his apartment is on the second floor, Lord help us with that extremely heavy furniture. Provided that no one gets mamed or killed, we will be back home tomorrow night. I'm sure we will all be really tired and possibly sore, but it doesn't matter, because that's what you do when you're a family, you help each other out.