I also wanted to title this blog "Why the Player Family Rocks"
So I'm a little behind, but I decided rather than posting all of the Christmas festivities that occurred in Kansas at the Player household, I would leave you to just look at my facebook album of pictures. If you read those picture descriptions, you pretty much get the gist of how things went down. The day after Christmas, however, is definitely post-worthy:
My brother, Kevin, and his new wife, Amy, moved to India on Sunday Dec 28th. Let me guess...the word "Why?" just went through your head. (yeah, I get that a lot). He's pretty much a genius-that's why. So the story is... Kevin is in his last semester of grad school at KU for electrical engineering. For the past year or so he's been working for a company called
CRESIS . They study polar ice sheets and global warming stuff. His professor/boss basically set up an opportunity for Kevin to study at the Institute of Technology in
Kanpur, India It's basically the M.I.T. of India, so definitely an amazing opportunity for him. It also worked out for Amy to be able to go with him. So off they went. Unfortunately the phrase, "Moving to India" involves one word I don't like.-MOVING!
So on the day after Christmas, Kevin, Amy, My Dad, and my brother, Martin & I all headed to Lawrence to move Kevin & Amy out of their house. It was somewhat bittersweet considering my family had finished building that house with their own hands just 3 years ago. Kevin has lived there ever since the family project was completed. There have been lots of good times in that house! It's where I lived with him as well. So it was a little strange to be emptying it out to rent to a random couple from craigslist or whatever.
We could not have asked for more beautiful weather! It was about 70 degrees the whole day, and being Dec 26th in Kansas--that's just weird weather! We had the doors all open, which made taking things back & forth to the van that much easier. Dad borrowed a big van from work, so we could have something to haul everything over to their storage unit. I was in a t-shirt and thought myself pretty stupid for having worn my "Spain boots" that day (black leather winter type boots). Amy and I spent most of the day packing up boxes in the house, and then placing them by the front door for the boys to load into the van. It was a great system!
Kevin had recently been made aware of a local family in need, who had lost everything in a house fire. Anyone who is familiar with my family knows that when it comes to serving others, we grew up with two extremely giving parents! We learned very quickly what it means to be charitable and generous because we watched it occur so naturally in our parent's examples. Kevin's right up there with my parents when it comes to being generous, so it was no big surprise when he made arrangements to donate a lot of his "extras" to this family in need. (Desks, chairs, computer, lamps, dressers, etc). They loaded all of those things up for the last trip of the day and headed off to meet the Mother of the family at her storage unit. About an hour later, Kevin called Amy and said they had dropped the stuff off for the family, and now the van was stuck in some mud. He just asked us to bring over a couple of shovels. Little did we know what STUCK meant!
As much as we had enjoyed it during the day, the warm weather had caused the normally frozen ground to defrost. All of the other alleys between storage units were paved with gravel and fine to be driven on, but for whatever reason this ONE alley was nothing but grass. (or in this case-mush)..as if it were the forgotten alley or something. The back tire was sunk a good 6 inches down!
As a team we were scurrying to try anything. Kevin dug the mushy stuff out from around the tire, but the hole just immediately filled with water.
This is a picture of the tire jacked up as high as it could go. (yet still in the water) Dad was on "gas pedal" duty trying to get it outta there. We TOTALLY lucked out when we found a huge pile of JUNK just chilling around the corner from the van. We all dug through the pile for ANYTHING we could possibly use to help us out. Amy & I diligently searched for and shoveled any gravel we could find throughout the storage unit complex into a couple of buckets we found. We'd relay the gravel back to the van and tried to fill in the "mini-ponds" around the tires, hoping for some traction, but instead we just had gravel shoot out at all of us when Dad hit the gas. NOT GOOD! We dug "french drains" hoping to divert the water flow, We stacked cinder blocks underneath the tires-down into the puddles hoping the tire would recognize it as "hard ground", we used wooden garage door panels, roof shingles, etc etc. Amy & I even went around the corner and said a little prayer. I wish someone would have taken a picture of the 4 of us kids all covered in mud pushing with all our might everytime Dad went to hit the gas. We all were so tired by this point. We also were all completely covered in mud! But we were not about to give up-after all, we're the Player Family!
Now some might ask, "Why didn't you just call a tow truck?" #1 Money..we're the Players, meaning we're cheap and prefer to do things on our own. #2 We were far enough down the alley that a tow truck's chain would have had to reach about 50 feet to get to us, because a truck wouldn't have been able to go down there and #3 Where is the bonding in calling a tow truck?! (My Mom kept telling us to call Kevin & Amy's home teachers...cute huh. She obviously didn't fully understand the extent of our situation-but it gave us a good laugh).
So 3 1/2 hours later, Martin had found a metal grate that was part of a truck or something- I have no idea, but he threw it down and lo and behold suddenly the tire caught traction and Dad FLOORED it! The 4 of us were screaming and jumping up and down in excitement as if the van had just won a drag race. I think Amy & I may have even hugged each other in joy!
We went back to the house and hosed each other off-I think Kevin had already removed his muddy layer when we snapped this photo.
Kevin & Amy went back the next morning and took pictures of the "war zone" we had left behind:
So it ended up that wearing my Spain boots was inspired after all. I had tromped through the mush and water who knows how many times, and my socks stayed dry the whole time!
