Hello again! It's been a while since I posted, but not due to lack of things happening -- quite the opposite, in fact. Some things aren't for the blog but I've been more than kinda busy, so apologies for the long silence and let's get caught up a little!
Happily, despite our county having to roll things back to Phase 1 COVID-19 precautions (masks pretty much all the time, no indoor dining at restaurants, serious limitations on occupancy in all businesses, etc.), we have all remained generally healthy. There's been an occasional sniffle here and there -- how can there not be when we jump repeatedly back & forth between mid-winter and early spring temperatures? -- but so far the family is remaining about as healthy as we could hope for.
We also managed to dodge the weather bullet a few times (although we seemed to have solid cloud cover every night that there was supposed to be an interesting celestial event to see, darn it) but finally got our first real snow of the winter...
The holidays crept up on us and were suddenly here... and then Hanukkah was suddenly past. The five of us lit the candles together for the first couple of nights, and then everyone's schedule got a little too crazy for us to get together and the holiday came to a close. We figured "what the heck," and got together for a virtual 8th night (hey, we've done 3 seders some years for Passover, so why not 9 or 10 nights of Hanukkah?). It was good to spend the time, and Miri finally got the answer as to why her mother kept insisting no, she would not buy the full boxed set of Harry Potter movies on DVD when they found it on sale at Target a couple of weeks back. :-)
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| Gingerbread men, dinosaurs, chais, mogen Davids, and menorahs, all yummy! |
Now, some of you may remember my (mis)adventures with an IKEA toy chest waaay back in 2015 (detailed here, here, and here). Believe it or not, that didn't totally cure me of my addiction to ogling oddly-named build-it-yourself furniture (hey, I helped open the College Park store!) and have made several visits to the place since then, even buying a few items. I've even passed my addiction interest on to my sister.
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| I just had to include this sign; Miri made it back when she was 8 and having a bad day. It's kind of a family joke now, but a reminder that the teen years are not that far away...! |
...and the freakin' bed goes out of stock while she is filling in the order sheet.
The chair, too.
Needless to say, everyone was thoroughly bummed out by this, but the Pipsqueak understood that Mommy was really trying, and that she would still get the bed she wanted for her birthday... just not on her birthday. Cue the daily (and then later on, weekly) checks of the website. Out of stock in College Park... in Baltimore... in every store within a 150-mile radius... eventually out of stock pretty much everywhere on the planet. Miri never gave up hope but we were all getting a bit concerned.
Then, very suddenly, my phone rang around 10:45pm a couple of weeks back. Fearing the worst as I picked up the call, I was surprised to hear my sister with a big, happy, "The bed is back in stock! At least it looks like the same bed..." Well, it's not quite the same -- the new loft bed & desk combo is the Småstad but it's aaaalmost the same thing (the stupid chair, meanwhile, is still out of stock) so we spend some time trying to place an order only to figure out it's a) available in very limited supply, and b) only available for in-store purchase, no online payments allowed. In other words, we've got to hope they don't sell out again over the next three days until we can physically get to the store on Saturday. (Note: If you've never shopped at an IKEA store, do not -- repeat, NOT -- go on a Saturday. Sundays aren't exactly great, either, but unless you like sharing your space with whatever the absolute maximum occupancy allowable by law is for that space, don't go on Saturday!)
The one (rather weird) silver lining was that with all the COVID-19 precautions in place, we had a better than fighting chance to actually get our paws on the bed. On all TWENTY packages comprising the version we wanted, ranging from small 14-ounce plastic bags with hinges in them to 62-pound boxes more than 6 feet long and a couple of feet across.... some of them "pick it yourself" in the warehouse and some of them requiring a special "pick order" for the guys driving forklifts in the "no public allowed" regions of the building.
Saturday rolls around and the entire family gets to the store. There's a bit of confusion as we try to enter through the entrance because it had been closed as a pandemic precaution (but not labeled as such), leaving other customers exiting to point us to the correct spot through which we could actually enter the building. With me as navigator, we went straight to the Kids department to see the bed in the flesh, only to discover there were none out for display... but there was still an example of the now-extinct Stuva model with almost identical measurements and Miri decided it was tall enough for the desk to work for her, so (me navigating again) we went straight to the service desk in the warehouse. Several nervous minutes of waiting in a socially-distanced line later, we snagged the absolute last one in stock.
Holding onto the order confirmation printout like our lives depended on it, we headed back upstairs to the restaurant for lunch -- Swedish meatballs, of course! -- and then checked out a few other things we'd been interested in. First, Mom was interested in replacing an old couch with a couple of recliners, but when she sat in the chair on display that we liked she fit in it like a toddler on a sofa so it was back to the drawing board for that. Then AJ began looking for a small cabinet she could store all her scrubs in to keep them separate from the rest of her clothes, and eventually found one among the living room furniture. (Note: The still-unassembled piece is stacked with all the stuff for Miri's bed.) I needed to replace my old dishes (the set I'm using was a housewarming gift back in 1988 and it shows), so AJ turned the set I chose into my Hanukkah gift and then I got the text message saying our "pick" items were ready and we returned to the warehouse.
At the entrance, I went to grab a flatbed cart only to discover the cart conveyor had jammed. Having had an appreciable amount of practice un-jamming it years earlier as an employee, I stretched the "no public access" rule as far as I dared and managed to get several carts free for us and the small group of other waiting customers, and we began hunting down the smaller components we needed. We had already asked one of the IKEA workers on the display floor about the "kit" (since I had forgotten to print out the list I'd oh-so-carefully downloaded the night before) and he had me use my phone to take pictures of the parts list on his phone, so we knew exactly where to go to find each needed piece.
Except that several key items were not in the aisle & bin they were supposed to be in.
I went back to the service desk -- now three-quarters of the way across the warehouse -- and used one of the public terminals to look up possible alternate locations for what we needed, but everything matched the original information so it was back on line, and then back to the same (friendly & helpful) young woman who's put our order into the system a short while earlier. She was as baffled as me (and did the exact same searches I did!), finally coming out from behind the desk and walking with me back to where the boxes were supposed to be located... and then found them, one shelf down from their official location, with no signage. (The boxes were very narrow so the printed-on labels were nearly illegible.)
Next: The build begins!
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