"Goose"

I'd like to introduce you to our new goose. He's wild.

We bought this new (old) motorcycle on Saturday morning and it was quite an ordeal. Here's the story...stop reading now if you don't want to read a long story! It started on Friday afternoon when Bryan happened to look on KSL for motorcycles (which he doesn't often do; this was just a fluke) and saw this Honda XL 350 listed for a "screaming deal" (I've heard that phrase quite frequently in conjuction with the letters KSL...) Anyway, he was the first one to call on it and the lady said she couldn't show him the bike that day, but she set an appointment for Saturday morning at 10:00. She unfortunately couldn't give him directions to the house (it was her dad's bike, and was at her dad's house--so you'd think she'd know the way to her own dad's house, right? Nope.) and said Bryan would have to call back later to get directions from her husband. A little weird, but whatever.

So Bryan called and called back that night but only got a busy signal over and over. He also noticed that the ad was marked as SOLD, and figured that she'd sold it out from under us. He kept trying and Saturday morning finally got ahold of her. She said she removed the ad because she'd had about 70 phone calls in the first hour, and was tired of calls. So, she gave Bryan the address and we left the house in time to get there a little early. Bryan could just tell that the lady was not quite right (we'll just say that she was a few tacos short of a combo plate...) Anyway, we put the address in the GPS and it was not recognized. We drove to the street and the house numbers were not what she told us at all, so we weren't sure what to do. We called and called her number but just got a busy signal again. grrr...

We called our brother-in-law and asked him to do a reverse telephone number search online and he was able to come up with a completely different address. So, we gave it a shot and drove there. It was in a pretty scary downtown Ogden neighborhood and Bryan went to the door and knocked. I was very surprised to see him go inside the house! (we try to be very safe when buying/selling on KSL and if people seem shady we are extra careful...so I couldn't believe Bryan went in). Anyway, 15 minutes later and still no Bryan; I'm getting pretty nervous at this point, because who knows what's behind that door? Plus, we were looking at a motorcycle, which should be outside, so why was he inside for so long? Plus, he forgot to take his cell phone with him, so I had no way to see if he was OK. I began panicking a bit. So I locked the kids in the van and headed up to the door. (Thankfully there was a realtor at the house next door that was hosting an open house, and the realtor--who looked normal--was outside in his car, so I felt like we had a "witness" if anything scary happened!)

The house was creepy, stinky, and very dark (even on a sunny Spring morning). A somewhat scary looking guy with long white hair and beard (think "ZZ Top") answered the door, holding a picture of himself on a Harley. He said, "we're just in here talking motorcycles..." Anyway, Bryan was fine and the lady was just talking his ear off; stalling until her dad called and we could go up to his house. We said we'd wait outside until he called. We walked back to the van and she followed us, holding her little dog (which, I must admit, was actually dang cute). She slid open the van door and put the dog in Miles' lap, and the dog started trying to eat the sucker that Miles was eating at the time. Miles wasn't too fond of that, so we were trying to think of a way to kindly tell her to please get her dog off our son's lap. Then she started telling us all about how she met her husband (the white haired dude), who was a Vietnam vet and who had PTSD; she said, "he's psycho." (All the while Bryan & I are just thinking "please let us get the heck out of here....") We suggested we just go up to her dad's house and wait there for him, but she said "Oh, I wouldn't do that if I were you. He doesn't even want to sell the bike; he'll be mad. And my brother's the only one there. He's really pyscho."

Hmmm... so what should we do now? Everyone associated with this bike is turning out to be a pyscho; is it even worth it? But Bryan reminds me of what a screaming deal it is, so we head up to the Dad's house (with the correct address this time, the one she had given us before had 2 numbers reversed...) By the time we get there, we see the dad walking up the porch steps; he'd just gotten home. We were nervous to show up without her calling him, because if he really was pyscho we didn't want to make him mad. So we drove up the road a bit, and got out and let the kids stretch their legs and went on a little walk. Finally I just said "let's go--maybe the daughter is the only pyscho one and the dad will be normal." We drove back and when we got there, we found out that the dad didn't think we were coming (our appointment was for 10:00, but after all this other craziness is was almost 11:00), so he had told someone else that he could come get it and he was on his way right now. AND, he was going to pay $25 more than the asking price. So, Bryan quickly offered him $50 more than the asking price and said he'd load it up right now.

In the end, we got the bike, and guess what? Bryan met the dad, the mom, AND the brother, and they were all very nice, normal, and stink-free. We just had the bad luck to deal with the daughter. (The mom even said to Bryan, "I'm sorry you had to talk to our daughter. She's kind of a dingleberry.") So, my guess is that she really did have some brain problems (like some sort of brain damage, or TBI, or something) because this apple was one that fell REALLY far from the tree.

So after about 2 hours, a little panic on my part, and $50 more than we expected, we finally caught our wild goose.

Wanna ride?