Extra room and gasoline

We are heading back down to Southern California this weekend.  We will be having lots of fun hanging out with relatives.  With the state of the union as it is I think it may be a good time to ask my favorite question to some of the relatives, What If?  Perhaps I'll find someone who thinks like I do.  I highly doubt it.  My relatives are the types of people who have almost no food in the house because they eat many of their meals out and they shop daily to get the freshest stuff.  Few have a week of food on hand.  None of them think about disasters because even with the Northridge earthquake, or Sylmar earthquake food and water were available at the stores.  If not within a mile or two, at least within a 15 minute drive.  Some of their homes were damaged but it really didn't change their lives tremendously. 

 

My 14 gallon spare gas tank I got from Costco is broken.  I've had it less than a year and the plastic nozzle leaks.  What a mess I made in the garage while I sprayed myself with gasoline.  Glad nobody lit a match!  It has to go back, obviously.  I will be bringing several gas cans with me on the trip instead.  I can make this trip on one tank if there is no traffic and I drive 55.  Like either one of those things are going to happen!  At the bottom of the grapevine I'll fill up and once I get into the valley I'll fill up again.  I never use more than 8 or 9 gallons without filling the tank.  Anyone who travels with me thinks I'm just being courteous by providing bathroom breaks every two hours.     

 

One trip we are making when we are down there is to Ikea.  I'm constructing a new room in the house.  The family room is huge, the size of a two car garage (because it used to be a two car garage).  I'm going to be buying bookshelves to go along the back wall, but I really making the room about five or six feet narrower and putting the shelves in front of the new wall.  After it's done nobody will realize that there's a room behind the bookshelves.  I am going to have a room 18 feet long by five or six feet wide.  I am not sure how I'm going to work the door yet.  The book shelves will cover 16 feet of the wall and the door is going to be hidden somehow.  I may have a one foot gap on each side and have the door completely behind one of the sets of shelves.  It will be fun to figure it out.