Justice served

Tonight I was trying to cajole Devon into her bath, and one of the (failed) techniques that I used was to remind her that she had taken -- and loved -- baths at Henry's house with Henry. When I mentioned that, she said, "Henny house, bath Henny house!" and went on to babble for a minute or so about Henry's house. I think she really had fun spending time with both Henry and Theo, since she not only mentions their names with prompting but also spontaneously mentions them as well.

She's happy to be back in her milieu, though. Today I dropped her off at Elaine's, and sometimes when we go there she gets very clingy and wants me (or Walt) to stay. Today she couldn't have cared less if I was there; she went right up to a new set of tables and chairs that Elaine got while we were away and pulled one out to sit on. I chatted with Elaine for a few minutes while Devon made herself right at home, playing with puzzles, grabbing the furry ball they have and generally relaxing. I don't think she even noticed when I left.

I have to switch gears for a moment to have yet another rant about EXPO. We have finished the major work on the interior of the house, so the only real big project left is the backyard, which Walt is going to start to tackle this month. The good news about this is that we are finally reaching the point where Home Depot should not be a regular fixture in our lives. The bad news is that we're still emmeshed with them on a few fronts.

The most annoying one is our blinds. Back in August we had someone come out and measure the windows for blinds and then put an order in with EXPO. I mentioned this in a previous post, but if you've never experienced anything more luxurious than rice paper blinds (like me), then the price of even very basic window treatments is enough to give you a heart attack. We paid an enormous sum of money to order these blinds (since apparently everything has to be custom made, even the cheapo ones) and were told it would take about 3 weeks for them to arrive. The original arrival date was in September, I think something like September 17. It's now October and the blinds still haven't arrived.

Both Walt and I have made countless calls to the customer service team, and I think I can summarize that group as friendly but inept. Someone finally figured out that part of the order had been shipped to the wrong place, and I've had at least 5 calls so that Home Depot can have UPS pick them up and then ship them back to the right place. So far nothing has worked, and as far as I can figure out, some of the blinds are collecting dust at some other installation shop and the other ones are at the correct installer. In addition, the installer won't schedule an installation until s/he has the entire order. Knowing how long scheduling an installation date will likely take, I tried to get the customer service rep to schedule one for me assuming that our blinds will get shipped to the right address within the next week. No can do, apparently. It's all been hugely frustrating, and I'm getting tired of the sheets that we're using as curtains in the bedroom right now. It will be happy day when we finally get these people out of our lives.

On a much happier note, we finally got the lawsuit judgment, and we owe the former tenants no money. Hurrah! It was horrible to get sued, but it would have been far worse to be ordered to pay them the money they wanted (close to $6000). I feel vindicated about that.