In the last couple of days I've taken apart a dinner table, put together a new dinner table and four chairs (admittedly Max helped with the fourth as he was home from play school by then), took apart a crib, moved a dresser, and put together Max's new twin bed frame (I took his old kid one apart last week after his twin mattress arrived). Max also helped with the bed.
The new bed frame, dinner table, and chairs are all from Ikea. I feel like it's become such an understood, normal thing now that every Ikea construction project is a miserable experience that... shouldn't it be obvious that they need to make some improvements? Somehow, some way, find a way to make it better?
Today, as one tiny little example, my life would have been greatly improved if one of the screws that came with the bed frame was, like, a quarter of an inch longer. I mean, come on you ridiculous bastards. How much money are you saving by skimping on that one screw?
Anyway. I am tired and not feeling up to writing haiku about that nonsense right now, but I still wanted to say where the inspiration for the prompt came from. Maybe I'll do some haiku another time.
It sounds like you've been busy! From your enumeration I have learned: previously you had a dining table but no chairs (I imagine you and Kat stood, and the boys just ate off the floor, as that would be my solution), that one of your four new dining chairs is probably not as safe to sit on as the rest, and that Max has has no bed frame for a week and probably thought that sleeping on mattresses on the floor was the best fun ever. I sort of agree with you about IKEA. While I do think that their instructions are clear and that, with a little patience, you can get serviceable furniture out of it, I do also think that the construction quality could be a little higher without damaging their profit margins. A comment I've heard a lot from friends about IKEA furniture is that once you've put it together you'd better not want to take it apart and reassemble it again, which seems wrong for self-assembly somehow. As for the screws: you remind me that our parents's generation would always have a box of screws of many lengths and sizes and would have no trouble finding a replacement of the right length. I guess this shows how times change :)
Obvious Plainly written out And with clear pictures... yet This is going wrong.
Each screw is diff'rent, Nothing quite matches up. Re- Turn to vendor please.
[6 letter synonyms for obvious appear to be patent and marked and not much else. I did consider going with "NO IKEA" briefly but decided I could be more subtle :)]
Greg - ah, I see that I failed to mention taking out the one chair we still had that went with the old dining table, Miles' high chair (replaced by a new chair with a booster seat on it), and the two deck chairs we'd been using as placeholders.
We actually had his mattress in the living room for a couple nights before I got around to taking apart his old bed frame. But yeah, he liked having it on the floor for a bit. So did Miles.
Yes, quite - there is no way in hell I'm ever reassembling that bed frame again. The table... eh, that might be doable.
Also true: I've borrowed from Kat's dad's stash of nails and screws on several occasions :)
Heh, good choice on the acrostic. And I feel like I can relate to your first haiku all too well...
Once I awoke from the nightmare, it became glaringly obvious what to do next.
The Oracle had recently been telling me... she showed me the cards... “8 of Cups”, she said, “See how the man is walking away, his back is towards us. He has his knapsack and he’s moving out of town, moving on, he’s not hanging around. Even the scene shows waters receding and a setting sun, symbols of things coming to an end. Sure, there are new mountains to climb, there, in the distance, but not now. For now, he’s sticking to the foothills, skirting the edges, easing his way into his new path.” I nodded in affirmation, understanding the imagery as she explained it.
She pulled more cards from different decks, as if to back up the initial conclusion... The first was Black Swan: “To accept change gracefully. The black colour is about letting go and perhaps grieving that but still needing to let go,”she began. “The swan lives naturally in the west here, so that’s about things ‘going west’, a metaphor for death or changes. It’s single-minded in its direction... this is a one-way street you’re embarking on.” The next card was Quokka, a funky little marsupial: “recycling” she said first. “That’s about passing on to others what you no longer use. You’re not throwing things to the garbage, that’d be a shame. No, someone will get value from what you pass on. It’s a healthy way of letting go, of preparing for the inevitable change.” She shuffled the cards but them put them away, satisfied that she’d passed on the message to me.
I slept on it, but one last nightmare was needed to make it sink in... crash and burn or change willingly... these were the options. It wasn’t a choice. It was obvious.
Dragonfly - really like the way you've woven this together. The cards bring a new (and useful) angle to things and when you finish by bringing us back to your opening line it leaves a feeling of... completeness, I think. Finality might be the better word.
6 comments:
In the last couple of days I've taken apart a dinner table, put together a new dinner table and four chairs (admittedly Max helped with the fourth as he was home from play school by then), took apart a crib, moved a dresser, and put together Max's new twin bed frame (I took his old kid one apart last week after his twin mattress arrived). Max also helped with the bed.
The new bed frame, dinner table, and chairs are all from Ikea. I feel like it's become such an understood, normal thing now that every Ikea construction project is a miserable experience that... shouldn't it be obvious that they need to make some improvements? Somehow, some way, find a way to make it better?
Today, as one tiny little example, my life would have been greatly improved if one of the screws that came with the bed frame was, like, a quarter of an inch longer. I mean, come on you ridiculous bastards. How much money are you saving by skimping on that one screw?
Anyway. I am tired and not feeling up to writing haiku about that nonsense right now, but I still wanted to say where the inspiration for the prompt came from. Maybe I'll do some haiku another time.
It sounds like you've been busy! From your enumeration I have learned: previously you had a dining table but no chairs (I imagine you and Kat stood, and the boys just ate off the floor, as that would be my solution), that one of your four new dining chairs is probably not as safe to sit on as the rest, and that Max has has no bed frame for a week and probably thought that sleeping on mattresses on the floor was the best fun ever.
I sort of agree with you about IKEA. While I do think that their instructions are clear and that, with a little patience, you can get serviceable furniture out of it, I do also think that the construction quality could be a little higher without damaging their profit margins. A comment I've heard a lot from friends about IKEA furniture is that once you've put it together you'd better not want to take it apart and reassemble it again, which seems wrong for self-assembly somehow.
As for the screws: you remind me that our parents's generation would always have a box of screws of many lengths and sizes and would have no trouble finding a replacement of the right length. I guess this shows how times change :)
Obvious
Plainly written out
And with clear pictures... yet
This is going wrong.
Each screw is diff'rent,
Nothing quite matches up. Re-
Turn to vendor please.
[6 letter synonyms for obvious appear to be patent and marked and not much else. I did consider going with "NO IKEA" briefly but decided I could be more subtle :)]
Clear and simple, no
question, the correct answer
is so obvious.
Greg - ah, I see that I failed to mention taking out the one chair we still had that went with the old dining table, Miles' high chair (replaced by a new chair with a booster seat on it), and the two deck chairs we'd been using as placeholders.
We actually had his mattress in the living room for a couple nights before I got around to taking apart his old bed frame. But yeah, he liked having it on the floor for a bit. So did Miles.
Yes, quite - there is no way in hell I'm ever reassembling that bed frame again. The table... eh, that might be doable.
Also true: I've borrowed from Kat's dad's stash of nails and screws on several occasions :)
Heh, good choice on the acrostic. And I feel like I can relate to your first haiku all too well...
Morganna - well, maybe to *you*.... :D
no haiku from moi today, just a rave :)...
Obvious
Once I awoke from the nightmare, it became glaringly obvious what to do next.
The Oracle had recently been telling me... she showed me the cards...
“8 of Cups”, she said, “See how the man is walking away, his back is towards us. He has his knapsack and he’s moving out of town, moving on, he’s not hanging around. Even the scene shows waters receding and a setting sun, symbols of things coming to an end. Sure, there are new mountains to climb, there, in the distance, but not now. For now, he’s sticking to the foothills, skirting the edges, easing his way into his new path.”
I nodded in affirmation, understanding the imagery as she explained it.
She pulled more cards from different decks, as if to back up the initial conclusion...
The first was Black Swan: “To accept change gracefully. The black colour is about letting go and perhaps grieving that but still needing to let go,”she began. “The swan lives naturally in the west here, so that’s about things ‘going west’, a metaphor for death or changes. It’s single-minded in its direction... this is a one-way street you’re embarking on.”
The next card was Quokka, a funky little marsupial: “recycling” she said first. “That’s about passing on to others what you no longer use. You’re not throwing things to the garbage, that’d be a shame. No, someone will get value from what you pass on. It’s a healthy way of letting go, of preparing for the inevitable change.”
She shuffled the cards but them put them away, satisfied that she’d passed on the message to me.
I slept on it, but one last nightmare was needed to make it sink in... crash and burn or change willingly... these were the options.
It wasn’t a choice.
It was obvious.
Dragonfly - really like the way you've woven this together. The cards bring a new (and useful) angle to things and when you finish by bringing us back to your opening line it leaves a feeling of... completeness, I think. Finality might be the better word.
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