Does Thriftiness Pay?

Our Pilot now sports a hitch. My only question is whether saving $60 and attaching it ourselves was worth it. Why? you ask. I will tell you the story and let you decide. . .or Rob, since he was the one to pay.

After purchasing the hitch and bringing it home in the back of the Pilot, us girls left Rob to unload and went inside. A short time later Rob came it pale and limping. He claimed he had been lying on the garage floor in the fetal position for the last several minutes whimpering . . .because he dropped the VERY HEAVY hitch on his foot--his bare foot!

Before long it had swollen up nicely and turned many interesting colors--blue, purple, black, a little yellow and green. And it did this neat trick, it made grinding and popping sounds when walked upon. But being the stubborn male that he is, he refused to go get it checked. So for over a week he lived with it, stuffing it into work shoes and prying it out again. I was just waiting for the pain to wear him down. I must say I rarely detected a limp and on occasion forgot he had crushed it. But I realized it bothered him more than he let on.

A couple nights ago he was surfing the net trying to find symptoms of a broken foot. I am going to go out on a limb here and guess: swelling, discoloration, and a strange grinding and popping when one walks. . .oh, and PAIN. You would think a man in the medical field would behave more rationally. But I guess that’s the way it goes right. What do they say about plumbers and carpenters?—They are the last to benefit from their talent, right? But over the weekend he managed to attach the hitch, with a little help from me--I had to lay under the car and hold the very heavy hitch above my head while he put the screws in. I made sure my head was not below the thing.

His foot does seem to be improving. Maybe Rob was right. In the contest of pain vs. will he seems to be winning. I just wish I had remembered to take a picture of his foot.