January 22, 2001
I've broken a sweat in the middle of January, my muscles are shaky and aching from over-exertion, and I've broken six of my ten fingernails. "My goodness, whatever can she have been doing?" I hear you thinking.
IKEA.
Blessed, cursed IKEA.
I put together the "Abo" bookshelf tonight. This monster is a foot and a half taller than me. It took me fifteen minutes just to organize the boards and count all the hardware (or the "giblets", as I've taken to calling them -- you know, all the screws and nails and stuff that come in the neat little plastic bag).
It went relatively well, for an IKEA project. I only had to unscrew boards and start over twice, and that's not bad. It's not that the directions are bad. No, the directions are remarkably good, for consisting of nothing but pictures. It's just that you can never tell from the damned illustration which WAY the boards are supposed to go. I cannot even tell you how many times I have been putting together an IKEA project, thinking that everything was going just swimmingly, only to discover that half the boards are in backwards because I couldn't tell which way was up from the stupid drawing.
But that only happened twice this time, and luckily it wasn't after one of the irreversible steps involving nails, so it all worked out. The bookshelf took me three hours and approximately two quarts of orange juice, but now there's a perfectly lovely six-and-a-half foot tall bookshelf standing in the middle of our living room.
Under the circumstances, I think I'll wait for Keith to get home before moving it into position. I do not trust IKEAware in its precarious "assembled and not yet in final position" stage. It is that dangerous stage at which your previously-friendly IKEA bookcase is liable to take a powder and come crashing down on your head, or snag a board in the floor and strip out all the screws on the right side, or something to that effect. (Both have actually happened to me, and no, I am not making this up.)
In other news. I've been focusing a lot lately on the whole soapmaking thing, and also on starting seeds for our proto-garden this year, but I've written enough about that already, so I'll save it for a time when I have something actually interesting to report. Incidentally, if anyone wants handmade soap from us, write to me and I'll tell you what we've got. All I ask is that you pay me enough to cover the postage.