Rugs, rugs, rugs (guest blog by Chloe)

Saturday was the baby shower for me and Zoe. I was happy there were no "shower games" and though I have no idea what these games may entail, the sound of them was sufficiently ominous to make me feel I had dodged a bullet in avoiding them. Max and Bob came in at the tail end for food and photo ops. Overall it was very nice with lots of attention for me, cute little pink baby gifts, cards with interpretative drawings of the baby from Beth, and a cryptic card from my mom saying only "Rugs, rugs, rugs!"

We left that evening for Syracuse since Max had a 6am flight back to Oakland (using frequent flyer miles necessitates a certain amount of pain and poor travel times). The plan was to get up around 4:30am, drop him off at the airport, get breakfast, and then head back to Albany in time for the rug auction at noon. A fine plan if one doesn't consider the lack of sleep involved and the fact that driving back home in time for a rug auction loses some of it's appeal after virtually no sleep. Inspired by the fear of mom's ire if we missed the rug auction, Christa and I did manage to get back to Albany relatively on time (even though we started out going in the wrong direction on 480, as Christa is as directionally challenged as I am and does things "by feel." She did assure me she knew the way back to Albany, after all she had lived in Syracuse for 5 years while at the university and drove back and forth quite often. However knowing the way "by feel" means basically random selection of direction, and in this case the wrong direction).

We left from Albany and went to a small village called Chatham in upstate NY for the auction, aided by the ever handy GPS. By this time I was not terribly interested in the auction and after seeing the suggested retail values even less so (the most inexpensive rug was about $3,000, out of our price range.) We pulled up to the Chatham firehouse about 15 minutes before the auction was to begin. Mom went to register, shoved a pen in my hands and told me to go through the rugs quickly and mark the ones I liked. There were 6 piles of rugs arrayed around the room each consisting of about 30-40 rugs. Since the manual labor of completely exposing a rug was beyond my means, Christa and I flipped the corners of the rugs while I wrote down the ones I liked, all based on seeing approximately 2 square feet of a 100+ square foot rug. I was surpried to see that some were actually quite nice with the vibrant reds, greens, and blues I like. All the rugs mom bought at the auction previously were pastel colored and would have looked mournful in our cavernous apartment. I wanted color and these rugs certainly had color, but the prices still seemed to preclude purchase.

The auction began and I looked around the room and was surprised to see only about 10 people in the bidding audience. Mom whispered that some of them were dealers but it ended up that only 2 dealers were there and the rest were retirees looking for a $50 runner for their hallways. Basically the perfect situation for me. The dealers wouldn't be buying up 200 rugs, so there were plenty of bargains available. Mom told me in no uncertain terms that she would do the bidding for me and to just tell her which ones I liked and then be quiet. She is very very good at getting a bargain, mainly because she has no shame, grotesquely underbidding for things. In conjunction with the desperation of the auctioneer, I managed to buy 4 rugs for about $1,000 TOTAL.

I had never understood the people who claimed that they were "addicted" to shoppping. For me purchasing clothes or gadgets was tedious and the opposite of an adrenaline rush of any kind. But the rug auction changed all that. I wanted those rugs. Badly. And by those rugs I mean all the rugs. The auctioneer would laud the virtues of a "super silk" and a "300 thread count" and I would want it. Regardless of color or inherent beauty, the excitement of the bidding was addicitive. After about 45 mintutes my sister was more than ready to go and by that time I had bought 4 rugs even mom was looking a little worried. She reminded me that I would have to get these rugs back home to California somehow and that maybe 4 rugs was enough. I reluctantly agreed, all the while glancing back as we walked out to see if the perfect rug wouldn't be coming up next ....

Caught up in the excitement of the auction, logistics had taken a distantly backseat in my mind. We pulled around to the back entrance of the firehouse and a small El Salvadorian man tossed the rugs into out car (2 in the truck, two in the backseat). He didn't seem to have that much trouble, so getting home we were all unprepared for the sheer weight of these things. The three of us managed, barely, to get them inside the house. I wanted to examine my purchases as I had little idea what they actually looked like. Unfortunately the rugs were much too big for the available space in Mom's house so I couldn't actually unroll them. I was a bit nervous by this point and after getting a shipping quote from UPS was near panic. Over $800 to ship the rugs! Mom decided that I would take as many rugs possible back with me in the suitcases. She got the biggest ones she had and we managed to load the two smaller rugs that way. Sure I could barely lift either case and I had no room for my clothes, but at least two rugs would be making it to Cali.

Max, or Max's mom actually, saved the day. I told him the shipping issue in rather depressed tones. I pictures my precious rugs moldering away in my mom's basement, never to be unfurled. Well Gail called DHL, another shipping company and got a quote of $200 for shipping. I told mom about this and while sceptical, she called them as well. They asked various particulars such as box size and weight. We didn't actually know the size (we hadn't boxed them yet) or the weight (mom doesn't own a scale) so "estimated". The quite was for $150! When the man from DHL arrived he asked what our quote had been and what the specifications were. Mom told him what we had said for weight and size, he looked at her, smiled, and just winked. Damn she's good...