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One of the great things about the Internet is that it lets you track the movement of a shipment around the country. It’s amazing. You go online and, at the click of a mouse, you can see that a 650-pound crate containing a cast-iron claw-foot bathtub is on its way from Ohio.

I was the purchaser of this tub and I was very interested in its progress. Alas, knowing where the tub was did not mean that it would ever get to my house. One morning the tub was in a town called Elysium— or maybe that was Elyria? And when I checked later in the day it was in Cleveland. I called my wife at her office and told her the tub was on its way. Then the tub went to Toledo. I believe that’s west of Cleveland but it was still swell to see progress on the information superhighway. Sometimes the traveling tub was actually reported to be at a particular exit on the interstate. We knew everything except what the driver had for lunch, and when it would arrive.

My wife was very excited. The tub was critical in the shrine to personal pampering that she was constructing in our happy home. It was to be the centerpiece of a renovated master bathroom, a room that I will never be allowed to use. And as long as we were squandering money, why hold back? We decided to fix up the third-floor bathroom, too. I will perform my ablutions there.

It was the last major renovation (ho, ho, ho) required in this Victorian barn, which has required every possible major renovation. One day, during an earlier home improvement adventure, the contractor showed me a piece of wood with a stencil on it from a lumber company in North Carolina that assured that this was No. 1 Hearts. “This is very old wood,” he noted. “You can’t get wood like this now.” The carpenters seemed genuinely moved by this discovery and we all stood around in what would eventually be my new kitchen and agreed that this was an old house and this was a very old piece of wood. And I put the relic in my office where it is available today during normal business hours for visitors to see like a piece of the true cross. You can become a little sentimental with an old house and a little crazy, too. That brings us back to my wife. These renovations were her idea.

She called from her office eight or 10 times a day to inquire after her tub. Why she could not have tracked it herself, I do not know. She said she was busy.

After a bit more than a week of travel, the tub reached the Free State and fell into the hands of a local deliverer. Then the tub somehow got itself onto the back of a truck that had no lift on it. “We got a problem,” the dispatcher advised.

The driver moseyed about for a full day making other deliveries and musing on how he would get my tub off his truck. I called the dispatcher on the hour and half-hour and my wife called at other times. This made the dispatcher irritable. The tub was in the breakdown lane of the information superhighway. The Internet noted only “scheduled for delivery.”

The first truck driver demurred and eventually went back to the warehouse. It was a weekend now (the second weekend that my tub was traveling). They did not deliver on weekends. But on Monday, on another truck— with a lift— my wife’s tub arrived.

That truck was driven by a very old man. You would think that people who deliver cast-iron claw-foot bathtubs would have considered this. Think again.

This guy favored the volunteer method. At that time I had in my regular employ two plumbers (Brent and Brent Jr.), Doug “the purely professional painter,” Nick, the general contractor, his two carpenters, Chris and Scott, Nate the electrician and his two associates, and Fred the tile man. I don’t think I have left anyone out.

Once we got the tub out of the truck and out of its crate it was slimmed down to a mere 300 pounds. You would think something made of cast iron would not be fragile but we were told this tub was as delicate as a Faberge egg. It was like moving nitroglycerin.

I would like to tell you that was the most complicated problem we had last summer during home improvement. But two days after the tub arrived the tile company in Columbia hired two recent emigrants from Nigeria to deliver about the same weight of tile to us. They got lost (driving south for two hours, not realizing that Baltimore was north of Columbia) and arrived 10 hours late. And while they were trying to figure out how to get all that tile off the truck, some landscapers who spoke only Spanish accidentally ran into the Nigerians’ truck and we narrowly avoided an international incident.

They say no jobs were added to our economy last summer but that is just simply wrong. Half my neighborhood was under construction. The other half was thinking about it. And I was doing my part, too. I have the canceled checks to prove it.