Aisle 34

I had it all planned out. Down the last shelf. A perfectly planned solution to the problem of the unsightly crap that is cluttering my house. (Because, as we all know, the best solution for the problem of clutter is to stick it behind a door.)

I knew exactly what I needed and where it would go when I got it home. It had to be narrow, because the room is small. It couldn't be too tall because of the large heavy painting that I don't want to move. It had to have doors, obviously. And it needed to be unfinished wood so I could stain it to match the rest of the furniture.

I had narrowed down my choices to ONE item in the Ikea catalog.

But it wasn't there. I looked again. Checked the other side of the aisle.

Nothing.

So I asked.

They sent me back to the Aisle 34.

I walked slowly down the aisle.  Checked the shelves more thoroughly. Looked behind the items that were near where my piece should have been. Perhaps one had mistakenly been put in the wrong section?

Nope. Still nothing in the size and shape I was searching for.

Finally, I gave up and asked someone else for help.

Computers were checked, inventory researched.

He looked up at me, shook his head and looked quickly back at his computer.

"Out of stock."

I tried another tactic. I asked when he thought they might get it back in stock.

He furrowed his brow in deep concentration and consulted the computer again.

He glanced up at me, (to determine exactly HOW crazy an Ikea shopper I was, perhaps?) and then gave me the bad news with no further eye contact. (Clearly he had determined that I was on the CRAZIER side of the crazy Ikea shopper spectrum.)

It had been discontinued.

They were not getting any more in.  Ever. Again. It was gone. All gone.

Just like my brilliant, yet surprisingly affordable storage solution.

Ikea, paragon of furniture so cheap you can change your room seasonally, has a nasty habit of discontinuing items with no warning.

I've been caught in this place many times. Standing in front of the "Man with the Computer" who delivers the bad news. My brain flashing an anxious neon sign reading "Now What?!" over my head.

In my grief, I began to wander aimlessly around the aisles of Ikea. Searching for something that would work just as well (better even!) than what I had originally decided on. I went to the AS IS section,distracted myself briefly with the dining room chairs, walked back to AS IS again, and then came back to Aisle 34.

I thought of compromising with what they had. I tried to rationalize spending more money on something different.

And in my morose desperation, I came across someone's discarded notes.

A list of dimensions, circled items, prices and sizes. Written with one of those stubby golf pencils Ikea has lying around everywhere.

Someone's furniture dreams for the future written in the margins of an Ivar information sheet.

What secrets do these numbers hold? I can see desire and longing in the swoopy 2's. Stubbornness and hardship in the crosshatched 4's. I lose myself momentarily in someone else's numbers.

An indecipherable code of one moment in a stranger's life. The dreams and longing I read into it are my own. I view this artifact through the filter of my own experience. Not really learning anything except the width of walls and height of ceilings.

But what I really want to know is... Did THEY get what they had come for? Or were they still wandering the aisles like me?

Tonight I went home empty-handed, my own list left accidentally with the boxes that surrounded the empty space where my item might have been had it not been discontinued.

Protozoa do not belong in the dairy aisle

We have been having a wonderful year!

(Pretend I don't bitch and moan on a regular basis and forget about all the bad stuff that has happened)

Which leaves us with:

We have been having a wonderful year!

My son likes (tolerates?) going to school. He does NOT cry every morning when he wakes up (like he did for YEARS).

He has FRIENDS! Several children called him while he was sick to see how he was feeling. Although when I asked him if he missed his friends he said "no".

He thinks his friends are hilarious, and he often recounts verbatim the conversations they have at school. But he does the same thing with SpongeBob.

I guess what I'm saying is that there was a time in my son's life that I was not able to envision him being so self-reliant and tolerant of mainstream school.

And then...

(What?! I've always got an "And Then"!)

I took him to Whole Foods. Which was strangely empty because all the people in this hoity toity town I live in GO AWAY during Spring Break.

but anyway, I took him to Whole Foods and he acted like an amoeba on amphetamines. No bones holding him up, jerky spasmodic movements and twirling. TWIRLING! Come ON! He didn't even twirl (well not much) when we were in the depths of Daniel-despair.

And I know that there are several people in my town that read this blog  - so if you were in the Whole Foods today (the little one, not the airplane hangar one) I'm really sorry my kid flailed himself into your cart. Oh, and lady in the dairy section, I apologize that my son managed to get in your way every time you tried to avoid him in order to get yourself some of that delicious cream cheese.

Um, and to the guy near the cornbread - I swear, he isn't always like this. And last but not least - Lady with the Bagels, I promise, really promise that we will never buy bagels there again, sorry.

It's not like I didn't try to reign him in. I got down on my knees in the store and talked to him. CALMLY. I took away the magic something-or-other cards that he was holding onto that seemed to make his head get all floppy. He was fine once we got back home. Maybe its the lights???

But all of this buying something for dinner was just a distraction from my own spring fever. Which is materializing in a manic desire to buy something (big! furniture!) from Ikea. Ivar? Magiker? A buffet? Cabinets?

My life will be much, much better once I find a suitable piece of furniture in which to store all the things I can't bring myself to throw out.

Only a few more days until school starts again....

Fever frenzy

Not feeling well today.

Not terrible exactly, just a slight sore throat, with a low grade fever and the promise that tomorrow will be worse.

Which of course it will be because I am busy all morning. Out of the house - busy. As if I have a life -  busy.

Eh.

So I don't know about the rest of you, but when I get a low grade fever I do things like climb mountains (hiking, I think it's called. I don't actually climb them so much as walk up them at a leisurely and not too brisk pace.) But this morning there was a veritable deluge of water falling from the sky, so no mountain walking up-ing for me.

Instead I moved furniture.

I moved a cedar chest from the bedroom to the living room, and a bookcase from the dining room to the bedroom, actually two bookcases. Upstairs, downstairs, I was a one woman moving machine.

And each time I hit the stairs with a heavy and incredibly awkward piece of furniture I imagined myself being crushed by said heavy and awkward hunk of wood and I could hear my husband's voice   saying, "You're insane, you know that?" To which, I replied in my head with, "I think we've already established that."

So now, tonight, my sore throat doesn't feel so bad considering, since my back hurts and my neck aches and I smashed my foot by resting a large wooden object on it in a hurry.

But if you were here, and were kind enough to ignore all the clutter, I think you would approve of the "improvements". ("Improvements" is a word I like to use instead of saying "Look dear, I didn't spend any money at IKEA".)

Photo by yewenyi.

The horn on the bus goes beep beep beep

I like to think of myself as a pretty good driver. (Don't ask my husband - he's a liar). Anyway, I've driven lots of places, and I've never gotten into an accident - knocking on wood here. When we lived in Brooklyn we bought a car, so that Daniel and I could go places, since we lived so far out.

I was a good driver in Brooklyn - maybe that's an oxymoron- but I could honk and curse and slam on my brakes with the best of them. Daniel and I went to the Brooklyn Museum, and Coney Island, the Prospect Park Zoo, and the Brooklyn Children's Museum. I was a natural at city driving. And all this in a rusty gray Volvo that had seen better days.

I think that car had spent some time at the bottom of the river, because whenever I turned on the rear windshield wipers, the brake lights blew. When I fixed the brake lights, the fuse for the turn signal would go. And sometimes the front windshield wipers would refuse to work - usually when it was raining.

My point is, none of this daunted me. But now after being in the suburbs for a few years, I have gone all soft and squishy. I would be an embarrassment on the streets of Brooklyn now.

Case in point: I wanted to get some bookcases from Ikea. So I checked online to see if they had them in stock. The Ikea in Paramus didn't have them, but the one in Elizabeth did. Easy, right? Just drive to the Ikea in Elizabeth. After all that's where I used to go all the time before the Paramus store opened up.

I couldn't do it. I decided to wait, I found excuses not to go. But today I was determined to go, so I got my Mapquest directions (I know, how lame is that? I've been there a million times!) and I got in the car. I'm driving down Bloomfield Ave. on my way to the GSP and my brain tries one last time: "You really don't want to get on the Turnpike, people drive like animals on the Turnpike. Why not just drive to Paramus and see if they have it. Maybe the computer was lying. Go on, you want to go north not south!"

And being the chicken-pansy that the suburbs have turned me into, I followed my brain's advice. And guess what? The computer WAS lying - they had everything I needed in stock! I mean how often does that happen at Ikea?

So after paying, and then WAITIING for them to bring the bookcases to Furniture Pick-up, and then CHECKING each piece over in front of the Ikea-man to make sure all the parts were there (they weren't), and then PACKING it into my car and realizing that the three things on the bottom were missing parts, and BRINGING them back to Furniture-Pick-up to be replaced, and WAITING again, I went home. As you can see it was a very successful day for a lily-livered-chicken-skinned-parkway-driving-ninny.

Photo by Khaz.