Mandy: "Now when you get on the island you will pass big houses on the water. Don't get your hopes up. Our house is not like that, but we call it home. And our home is decorated in "Golden Girls" motif."
We picked up the key to Mandy and Chuck's second home, their beach house, on Seabrook Island, about 30 minutes from Charleston. Mandy and her children planned to join us later.
The house is what we Floridians call a "condo" and it is built on stilts with a patio underneath. It is a couple of blocks from the beach. It is a three bedroom, two bath condo with a living room, family room, kitchen, dining area, and a small side porch. Mandy and Chuck bought the place with everything in it and they haven't changed a thing.
The color scheme is green, magenta, and tan. The furniture is mostly wicker with all of those colors. Hanging throughout the house are various framed printings of the same object (I thought it was supposed to be a flower) in those same colors. They were all done by the same artist and apparently the previous owner fell in love with this artist and/or this object. He told Mandy that the pictures could be whatever the viewer wanted them to be. He specified a sailboat.
Hmmm. I looked at them quite a bit and decided they were what a flower would look like under a microscope. Connie decided by the second day that she thought they all looked liked vaginae. We never saw another thing after that announcement. I am also sad to report that Mandy gave me one of the vagina paintings and I mistakenly left it by the front door when I left.
The condo was very hot and stuffy when we arrived and the temperature inside reported it at 87 degrees. We turned on the complicated Honeywell thermostat and attempted to program it to a cooler temperature. There were all sorts of buttons and programs and instructions, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get a "filter" sign to quit blinking. Mandy also attempted it when she arrived as did Chuck via phone. We finally gave up and Mandy left a message for an air conditioning company to come out in the morning.
We opened all of the windows and turned on all of the fans. By the time we went to bed, the temperature had dropped 2 degrees so we all took cold showers and went to sleep under the fans.
The next morning the temperature was down to 80 degrees. I changed the filter in the return on the wall, but the "filter" sign was still flashing. The repair company would not be able to get out to the condo until the following morning so I decided to call the 800 number on the instruction panel. My call was placed to somewhere in India.
Jane: "Hello, I am Jane and I will be of service to you today. May I have your telephone number?"
Me: "Uh, uh (frantically searching for the phone number to the condo) Uh, hold on. Joyce, what is the phone number to this place? (Joyce now frantically begins to search) Well, I don't know the phone number. I'm staying in this house and the owner is at work." (Mandy had gone into work to put in her resignation letter)
Jane: "Just a phone number will do."
Me: "What? Any phone number?"
Jane: "Yes, please."
Me: "Uh, okay." (I give her my number in Florida)
Jane: "And your name?"
Me: (I give her Mandy's name thinking that they are looking up her thermostat or something)
Jane: "And could I please have your zip code?"
Me: "My zip code? Joyce, what is the zip code here?" (Joyce frantically begins to search for a zip code) "Never mind, just give me your zip code." (I give Jane Joyce's McClellanville zip code)
At this point, I realized that there wasn't some secret spying device that needed Mandy's information to peek into her thermostat, but that Jane just needed to fill out some form. Won't that be an interesting form, with a Florida phone number, a different name and a South Carolina zip code? Sigh.
Jane proceeded to ask me my problem and I laid it out in detail. She told me that I would have to punch 3 different buttons "very quickly" to get rid of the "filter" sign and restart the system. Joyce fingered one button while I fingered the other two and when I yelled "go" we punched away and BAM the filter sign quit flashing. We were in business...for what I don't know, but I felt smug.
Jane: "You will need to change your filter in the furnace, but that will restart your system for now. Can I be of any more service today?"
Change the filter in the furnace? What furnace? We wanted cold air! I thanked Jane and hung up and we headed out for the day. Joyce and I took Macie, Darcy, and Madison to the club to swim. We left Connie behind with Eva and the babysitter, a nice nanny named Ty, who sits for Mandy 3 days a week.
The village is something out of a movie set. It is definitely a tourist trap, but it is so quaint with a pharmacy and soda fountain shop, a lollipop shop, a bookstore, a sporting goods store, artist shops, coffee houses, and a nice open grocery store. On Mondays, there is a farmer's market, but we got there just when they were closing and boxing everything up. We spent some time planning menus and just walking around the grocery, returning an hour later to find the temperature had upped to 80 degrees.
Mandy returned from resigning her position and returning all of her electronics. She had been gone all day and I was sure that she was rethinking her quitting, but she claimed it was because she had paperwork to fill out and she had to stop off at the phone store to buy a cell phone. She returned to find her older daughter with fever and her younger one asleep. Macie seemed fine but was running a fever so Mandy got on the phone and called her doctor as well as the air conditioning company. Neither one was helpful. The doctor said the stomach flu was going around (Macie had thrown up at 4:00 AM) and the air conditioning company repeated they would be out in the morning.
Chuck arrived and we all went to the beach for awhile. Connie, Joyce, and Eva sat a bench and watched the rest of us frolic in the warm Atlantic water. The property owners have formed an organization to save the beach so there aren't houses close to the beach like we have in Florida. The tide was high with very few waves, but the three kids had fun running through the water splashing and throwing seaweed and chasing seagulls.
The next morning we awoke to a freeze! The air conditioning was at 74 and we were now complaining.
We waited and waited for the air conditioning man who finally showed up and immediately tried to sell Mandy a maintenance contract. He was no match against all of us women! He checked out the unit and told us that it was a 1988 unit that was falling apart (we had finally located the system ourselves the night before and figured that one out on our own). The bottom was rusted, the coils were ancient, and gee, no maintenance contract was going to fix that. He cleaned some coils inside, declined the offered vagina painting, took his money and ran. We left Mandy and Eva and went into the village where we spent several hours playing tourist and eating lunch at the soda fountain counter.
We left Seabrook about 4:00 PM and headed back to Joyce's. James looked well rested when we arrived. We looked like we had been put through the wringer. Joyce and Mandy the worst as the kids had cried and screamed the whole drive back. It was good to be back in our cottage in the woods.
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