Monday, November 29, 2010

Patterns and crappy furniture

When you go to law school, one of the first things you learn to do is look for patterns.  These things are alike because of x, these things are different because of y.  For example, if I have a red apple, a green apple, and a red pomegranate, which ones go in the basket of like items? Depends on what the "like items" are.  I can put in two apples.  Or I could put in a red apple and a red pomegranate, if the like items are limited to red items.  I could put in both apples and the pomegranate, if the like items are pieces of fruit.  Can I put a melon in the basket of fruit?  How about a tomato?  What if the basket is fruit with thin skins, what has to come out?  And so on and so forth.

I have yet to figure out the pattern of where to drop Greg off in the morning.  Inside the front entrance or outside on the playground, its a mystery.  The school is (roughly) L-shaped, and the two drop off sites are at opposite ends. If we pick the wrong one we have to walk all the around the entire school. The past few weeks we have had:
* 34 degrees and sunny = inside
* 42 degrees, lightly drizzling = outside
* 35 degrees, ground damp from overnight rain, but not currently raining = inside
* 35 degrees, ground damp from overnight rain, not currently raining = outside
* 33 degrees, overcast = outside
* 45 degrees, drizzling = inside
* this morning was 32 degrees and sunny = inside

Anyone know what the pattern is?  I'm ok with raining = inside, sunny = outside, but as you can see above, that doesn't seem to be the rule.  As far as I can tell, the rule is flip a coin.

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Its not a holiday weekend unless I am building a POS from Ikea.  True to form, I built a dresser this weekend.

I have no quibble with the style of Ikea.  I think its stylish, modern, and inexpensive. We have plenty of furniture from Ikea. I am slowly trying to replace our Ikea furniture with better pieces, generally thrifted from Craigslist, but I needed a long low dresser to go in the Mister's closet, so I went with the readily available item from Ikea.

I do NOT think Ikea furniture is sturdy or well made.  I have thrown out a lot of Ikea furniture over the years. Just a few months ago we threw out the boys' Hemnes dresser because it literally fell apart--the side supports cracked and separated from the body of the dresser, and it was unfixable.  When we moved, the moving company had us sign a form saying that if any Ikea furniture broke in the move was not their fault.

I have built so many pieces of furniture from Ikea over the past ten years I've gotten rather good at it. I sit down, read the directions, separate all the pieces into piles that will be used in order, and put all the screws and widgets in the same order that they are in the instruction booklet.  It generally goes pretty quickly.

 Even when it goes well, I spend a fair amount of time cursing the Swedish population and their flatpack engineering.  And then, there are times like this, when words do not adequately convey my rage:

Duct tape to the rescue.

Of course, its in the front, and visible.  Le sigh.

My goal in life is to own furniture I don't have to build myself.

2 comments:

  1. I see at least you had Peter's help putting said dresser together :-)

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  2. Wow, that is poopy. I've never had this happen to me, in fact my Ikea dining table and chairs is going on 7 years old and it was in such great shape I was able to sell it for $150! But there aren't a lot of moving parts on it, either.

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