Thursday round-up

by Linda Hopkins

First up, I want to share with you the Harmony Board that I created for the birthday dinner celebration for my dear friend, Lisa, on Tuesday night.

I’m spending my summer working on a business plan, website, social media pages, logo, etc. for Harmony Boards. Kim and I are going to her family home in Canada later this month to escape the heat and to brainstorm and plan the launch party for late summer or early fall.

Of course, I’ll keep you posted once we have the date locked down.

Secondly, while I was going through the photos on my computer looking for some pictures I took back in April, which I needed for my last post, I came across something I’d meant to share, but then forgot all about.

If you remember in THIS POST from May 2nd, which was about my backyard remodel I said,

“In a future post, I’ll share with you all the drama that occurred on granite delivery day. It was quite the thing.”

Do you think July 26 is too late to finally share it? Hopefully not, because here we go.

Photo credit: Lifted from Ronnie’s FB page

On the early evening of Wednesday, April 4, 2018 my friends and former neighbors, Mike and Ronnie Jaap, stopped by to see my backyard remodel. They were considering using the same company I was using and wanted to check out the progress over here. Afterward, we had plans to go out for dinner.

Earlier that day, in the late afternoon, a load of granite had been dropped off on the road on the south side of my house. The pile was in the street on the other side of my double gates. The pile had orange cones on all sides. This is common practice around construction projects and is allowed.

It was about 6:00 pm as Mike, Ronnie, and I were walking on the far north side of the backyard, talking about how happy I was with Garden Plus Landscape & Pools. Suddenly, we heard a loud crash and looked toward that double gate on the other side of the yard to see a huge plume of dust and dirt explode over the gate.

As we quickly made our way to the side of the yard, we heard a man’s voice cursing loudly and through the wooden slats of the gate, we could see that he was out of his car and walking around it.

It didn’t take more than a second to know what had happened. This guy had plowed his car into and up on top of my pile of granite. Mike was about to open the gate to make sure he was OK, but we could tell from his yelling that he was fine, physically, anyhow.

I asked Mike to not open the gate, I didn’t want to get into it with this guy. Instead, I quickly called Garden Plus and talked to the owner, Rene. Rene said that someone would be there in 5 minutes.

We went inside, gathered our stuff, and got in Mike’s car to go to dinner. When we pulled out of my cul-de-sac, we could see that Garden Plus was already there, about 3 minutes after I had called!

We slowly drove by and could see and hear the guy cussing out Gabriel from Garden Plus. We just drove on by.

Our plan was to go to dinner at a restaurant south of my house but when we arrived there was a 2-hour wait. We got back in the car to go to another place that is north of my house. To get there, we had to drive back by the house. We could see that there was another Garden Plus truck there with several workers using shovels to remove the granite under this dude’s car, digging him out of his stupid situation. AND there was a police car there too. We kept driving.

When Mike and Ronnie dropped me off a few hours later, all the granite was out of the street and piled in my backyard. Those amazing guys had moved it all shovel by shovelful in the dark, after helping the ungrateful fool get his car out.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I had the chance to talk to Gabriel and hear the rest of the story:

When Gabriel arrived the guy went off on him. He proceeded to tell him that his daughter was an attorney and he was going to sue them for everything they had for leaving that granite in the street. It got so out of hand that Gabriel called the police. By the time the officer arrived, more men from Garden Plus were there digging the guy out. The dude goes off and is calling the men all sorts of racial slurs and cursing the officer about the situation.

Finally, the officer had enough and told the guy that it was obvious that HE was not paying attention while driving. That not only were there cones around the pile but there was a cone underneath his car, where he had obviously plowed over it. And that if he didn’t shut the hell up and apologize to the men helping him out of his idiotic situation that he was going to write a citation. The guy tried to argue and the office explained that the pile was, in fact, allowed to be on the street and that he was lucky it was a pile of granite and not another car parked there or a child on a bike! That finally shut him up and he begrudgingly apologized. The officer stayed until the car was movable and the guy left.

And that is when the men continued to work and shovel all that granite in the dark. Not because they had to but because they are just that way.

The photos I’ve posted of the situation were taken by Gabriel, he kindly shared them with me. The photos of the granite moved to my backyard and the clean street, taken the next morning, were snapped by a shocked and grateful me. Shocked that they did all that in the dark when they should have been home after a long day’s work, having dinner with their families.