Surviving IKEA

Working at home. After a while using the dining room as an office gets old. It’s not an efficient workspace – especially if you need to spread things out and hang things up as I do. Its hard to invite friends over for dinner unless you want to have a techy theme party and use keyboards as place mats.

When my husband and I moved into this house a few years ago there was already an area in the basement that was framed out with two by fours – someone had clearly meant it to be a home office. A phone hookup was already there.

So I casually ventured about a week and a half ago that I might just throw up some sheetrock and move downstairs.

Well. I am not going to tell you just how we got from that conversation to where I am today but I am sitting in my new office. It has track lighting, a bunch of outlets, has been sheetrocked and plastered and wi-fied.

And it was done by professionals. I know! It’s a miracle.

But, of course, I needed office furniture -and there were those bookshelves we had been talking about for a few years. Huge piles of books have been inaccessible in cardboard boxes (also in the cellar).

Last Saturday my chivalrous husband borrowed a truck and off we went to IKEA.

This was my first time there so I thought I was doing tremendously well by bringing the catalogue all marked up with what I wanted chosen beforehand. [my desk] [my chair] [our bookcases 3x]

First: things they don’t mention in the catalogue or in the store and which I I didn’t see until I looked the links up online to share with you here. Under good things to know – “2 people are needed to assemble this furniture” (they are talking about the bookcases). I’m not two people but I did it myself (and I have the bruises to prove it – they are very heavy). It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know or they might still be in their boxes.

Anyway – back to the store. Our version has the shopping area on the second floor and arrows telling you where to go. The problem is the arrows seem more like a cattle herding device than a wayfinding aid. There used to be (perhaps still is) a hospital routing system that had arrows on the floor that actually said where the arrows were sending you. IKEA might want to consider that. They may also want to consider handing out floorplans. Perhaps they do. I never found one of those lists you were supposed to mark up either. I used my catalog for reference.

I did finally find the items I was looking for (unfortunately the green chair I wanted wasn’t in stock so I chose black and the aspen desk base was also out of stock so I had to get white.

Now to find the stuff (warning – this is the worst part). When you find yourself in the cavernous warehouse portion hauling a big flat cart it is not a thrill to find that office stuff (which they confusingly named workspace stuff )is located in aisles 3, 6, 7, and 9.

Somehow the desk base was not classified as workspace stuff so required intervention by a very helpful IKEA worker who found it on the computer (but the computer was wrong). Another miracle (luck) and we found it anyway.

On to the bookcases. We found the bookcases (also not easy and not, as I thought, alphabetical). We hauled the very heavy boxes onto the cart, headed up to the checkout and waited in line to be told “you dont have everything you need for your bookcases”. Apparantly they came in two boxes. One box said 1 and another said 2. Unfortunately neither box said 1 of 2. @!#$%

My very chivalrous husband took the already heavy cart back to get the three more heavy boxes. I stayed and paid for the items and waited for him to return – which he did, red from effort and muttering “this is my last trip to IKEA”.

It could have been worse. Much much worse. We could have gotten back from our trip to IKEA, returned our borrowed truck only to find we needed those three boxes so I thank that helpful check out person.

The upside? My office furniture was so easy to assemble I finished it that day. I did the first bookcase on Sunday the rest yesterday and we’re done. I love all of it. Clearly a lot of work went into designing the pieces so they would fit together correctly, easily and solidly. The only tools I needed were a hammer and a philips screwdriver. They provide the rest of the tools.

My husband may not go back but I probably will.

September in the Garden

I haven’t done a garden post in a while. I’m not quite sure why – my garden has practically been doing jumping jacks to get my attention.

Especially exciting is the flower bed I started this season. It certainly doesn’t look new – I’ll have to thin and re-arrange but here it is in all its glory and to think this spring I thought it would be full of bare spots all season.

Annuals help in that regard – so do the sunflowers and the I-don’t-have-words-for-how-huge the Cosmos grew. They are honestly 7-8 feet tall.

Check them out in comparison to the sunflowers.

And the roof.

Here the cosmos are up close. I had to stand on my toes.

And for good measure the nice Japanese Maple and the Black Eyed Susans.

Cooties

Remember cooties?

I honestly thought it was a short lived social aberration confined to the late 50’s and early 60’s. Of course that was when I was a child – which explains why I made that erroneous assumption.

Cooties was the grade school way of separating the popular from the untouchable kids. It was a quick and efficient way to separate “us” from “them”, usually gave the “us” group a power high and the “they” group days, weeks, months or even years of agonized misery. Cootie catchers were a popular part of the whole cootie thing but unfortunately were not meant to be a treatment, instead served as sort of an official medical test for the disease

The “us” group usually morphs into a “clique” by high school which is really a genteel term for what would be considered a dangerous street gang outside high school walls.

Now it took me years to catch on to the fact that Cooties is a chronic, recurring, lifetime affliction (similar to those unmentionable chronic diseases that flare up when your immune system is down). The first sign came when I realized that cliques never really went away either – they just went underground and disguised themselves variously as “social circles”, book groups, boards, committees and the like.

So anyway, it wasn’t long after that discovery that I could feel the old case of Cooties flaring up.

Seriously, they need to come up with a vaccine. Its a pretty serious disease.

For more information on this debilitating chronic disease read the wikipedia article here. Since cooties adheres to Darwinian principles it is crucial to not admit to ever having had or even having known anyone with Cooties. Diseases which should be ruled out prior to diagnosis include hypersensitivity.

Note: This is an anonymous column written by a mystery guest writer. Everyone knows I’m an “Us” and don’t have Cooties. No one here in Stepford does.

The Beginning Golfer Chips Into the Hole From 50 Yards

out of the rough on the wrong side of a bunker

I wasn’t going to write this. I really wasn’t – but seriously.

I have the highest handicap at my club. (So you know I have to be humble).

In fact I have often thought over the last few years that having the highest handicap is a distinction (of sorts).

I am not a good golfer

I am just trying hard.

This is for all of the beginning golfers out there. This is what keeps us coming back. The good shot.

It can happen to you.

And don’t let those snobby good golfers get you down. We are nipping at their heels!

-ps. several holes later the golf pro pulled up in his golf cart, probably checking out the pace of play, just in time to watch me laboring away at my steep walled bunker shot. It wasn’t pretty. I did get out but it took three tries.

arggh. . .

Arm Yourself for Turning 50 – Part Two, The Workplace

Having covered beauty in part one I thought it was time to get more serious and cautionary. It isn’t as though we don’t know it’s coming. It resides deep in our souls.

The truth is that in todays job market, unless you are lucky and latch on to one of the very few organizations or jobs that hire employees that stay on for years – unless you are independently wealthy or already run a successful business, you know you may find yourself out of a job at any moment. When you are young – as long as the reason you are out of a job can be blamed on the vagaries of the economy, i.e. the company folds (happened to me) or you were hired for a position that the company discovered it didn’t actually need (happened to me) or the stockholders, new owners, etc ,etc, etc, wanted cutbacks (deep) then you will probably be ok. If you are young and viable you will either find another job fairly quickly or you can change direction (and then find another job).

We all fear this job-loss thing and tend to hold-on-for-dear-life to the jobs we currently have (if we can) because we know that our E-Z pass to job security ends about 10 – 15 years before our retirement funds are due to kick in.

That last 10-15 years are probably responsible for more stress related health problems than anything else. And they wonder why we have rising health-care costs?
It is a sign of modern times that experience is undervalued and enthusiasm is overvalued. Its a sign of modern culture that you have to at least look young (never mind that we are the coolest demographic in the last 100 years).

I started writing this post quite a few weeks ago and have been holding onto it for a while. I decided to finish it up after reading an article on boston.com that I thought worth sharing. This article Discrimination Comes in many Shades of Grey is well worth reading.

I am an essentially positive thinker and I know I am good at what I do. I’m independent and have come to love the flexibility that being in charge of my own time has given me. I have had more than one friend email me job opportunities that I don’t want to even look at. I want clients now – not jobs – and the wonderful thing is that I have clients. I have the time and flexibility now to learn new things in my profession that the chained-to-the-desk types simply don’t have.

If you find yourself looking for a job at 50 or above – Stop. Relax. Take stock in your skills.

Plan now to package your expertise (I am sure you have expertise) and be prepared to become a consultant or otherwise start your own business. It can be any business as long as it is an area you know.

The trick is confidence, friendships and building a network.

And your good ideas and experience.

** and then there is this. working at age 101

The Upside and Downside of Being 50

A few posts ago I wrote: “I have found that you start to get smarter about life after 50 which is a good thing. You’ll need all your smarts to negotiate the things you suddenly have to pay attention to that you never bothered with before.”

I thought that comment deserved a bit of elaboration so I will explain.

Under the category of things you have to pay attention to lurk a few that I should have paid attention to all along. Unfortunately now it’s become the health version of what happens when levees and bridges aren’t maintained properly. The rest consist of areas that are just simply going to go south (and south is the operative word here) no matter how sporty your car or expensive your face cream.

So here goes:

The medical stuff. I have to admit that I have never so much as given a second thought (unlike the rest of educated America) about my blood pressure, cholesterol, possible arthritis or memory loss. When I visited a doctor (which has been rare since the children were born in my late 20’s) I never paid attention to whatever those numbers were. When “grown-ups” said “You have to take care of your teeth because you only get one set.” I heard “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah”.

I haven’t had regular check ups as the few times I did visit a Dr. I would usually leave the office needlessly fearing cancer or some nasty disease. I was officially diagnosed with MS once (not sure where that disease went but it seems to have disappeared).

I know I am pretty lucky because most people left battling that sort of thing for the long or short term (as are several of my friends and relatives).

So now I’m 50 and all has changed.

Recently anything from turning my head to bending my wrist makes a definite cracking sound. My joints way of saying – “hello, remember us”? About a month ago I had a nasty spontaneous hemorrhage in my eye. My eye doctor thinks, since its not the first time, that I should have my blood pressure checked by my primary care physician.

Why high blood pressure? Its not as though I’ve had any stress this summer.

I need to pop on glasses for reading and makes notes to myself about just about everything.

So, reluctantly, I know I must arrange to make regular visits for checkups and probably pay a bit more attention to what the heck HDL and LDL are. groan.

If an apple a day kept the Dr. away I’d plant an orchard instead.

Appearance: Ok, As an essentially shallow person when it comes to my looks (don’t assume that means I am more than average looking but I sure as hell don’t want it to get worse) it is especially sobering to find that no matter what I do I continue to look older.

For weeks I am able to fool myself at least a little bit if I am careful about the lighting around the mirrors but I’ve decided that a top or side daylight peek into the mirror is probably a better scare than any Halloween costume I wore as a child.

For the first time ever I understand the skin cream and plastic surgery craze. I mean I would actually, voluntarily, allow some Dr. to fix something. Not something important mind you like a body organ but what looks like jowls they can cut into any time.

As soon as I win the lottery (not likely since I don’t buy tickets).

Of course now doesn’t seem like the time to elaborate on how I feel we are smarter after 50 as that might prove contradictory.

I’ll save the Upside of 50 for another time. Besides I’m still doing the research on that one

Signs of Fall

You know the Fall season is upon us when birds, U-Hauls and Budget Rent-a-Trucks start flocking. The birds are mostly planning their annual southern trip but the trucks are headed for college campuses all over the country.

Parents everywhere are simultaneously teary eyed and excitedly planning what to do with their free time. Personally I just lost a few hours a week since I now have to mow the lawn. Oh well.

My son also just traveled back to college. I sent him off with some of the extra pots, pans and kitchen implements I’d saved for just that day. He’s sharing an on-campus apartment with schoolmates this year.

I remember last year suffering a terrible case of empty nest when he left for his freshman year. It was the same year I turned 50 and was my daughter’s last year in graduate school. Its better now. I realize they do come back. Every time they do they are even more wonderful than when they left.

I hope when he studies during the upcoming semester he will remember the moment above – reading while floating in the Dead Sea.