This past week, we made the executive decision that we desperately needed to get a new desk. You may not have noticed this, but for the past 3 years, we had been using an old desk from Cynthia's parents' basement, with TV trays for our computer keyboard. It was not the most efficient (or comfortable) system, but our space requirements were pretty specific. We couldn't buy any desk because it had to fit our space.
Cynthia found the perfect desk at Staples in Altoona. She ordered it and we had to wait for it to arrive and make the trip to Altoona to pick it up. Now that we had a new desk in plan our old system (the one we had lived with for 3 years) became nearly unbearable.
Finally we got our desk and we began the setup at noon on Thursday. The desk came in one big, very heavy box; we were shocked to see the huge assembly booklet with 29 pages of instructions for building the desk.
The instructions assured us that two people could put together the desk in approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes. This is an unretouched photo:
We figured we'd be done well before 3:00 or 4:00, assuming that it would take us a little longer because there would be people coming in. (You know where this is going, don't you?)And so we began to work. It took a long, long time, and there were thousands of little pills of styrofoam everywhere, with a particular concentration in Kim's hair (she is apparently the one who is "attractive"), and what seemed like hundreds of pieces of desk with thousands more little fasteners.
We hammered and screwed and nailed, for hours and hours: 3:00 and 4:00 came and went. It began to get dark. At about 6:30, the desk was finally together. But then we had to move it. The old desk was heavy and wedged in hard. We took a break for dinner.Kim rounded up her husband and nephew during dinner, and they moved everything around, putting all of this:
into place, and left.
We were not done. The store was still littered with thousands of little pills of styrofoam, and all of the stuff we normally use to help people solve problems (see sentence 1) was scattered to the winds.
And so we kept working. By 10:00 that night, the store looked like this:
And we were ready to start helping people.
So if there are days that we look at you with tired eyes, and we drift off into a fog as we talk to you, forgive us. It's not you. It's probably a day where we were putting together a desk in a dark store the night before.
And now, we're off to do some quilting, crochet, and knitting!
