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drscottThe previous post explained why I'm exhausted after a three-hour shopping trip.
So today we drove up to East Palo Alto to hit Home Depot and IKEA. The primary motivation: new cabinets for the laundry/utility room, which currently has some sad shelving which looks cluttered. My compulsive partner wants everything as neat and put away as possible, so open shelves turn him off. IKEA sells some cheap but acceptably finished plain cabinets -- same price as utility cabinets at OSH, but much better built.
First we stopped at Best Buy, where we looked at HD plasma TVs. We picked out a few we liked -- cost about $8K. Knowing that these prices will drop 30% a year for years makes such a purchase rather foolish unless you're a corporate officer. But the pictures are stunning; Tivo/Directv will have HDTV/Tivo available in a few months, so it's all getting pretty practical. Maybe next year.... and since we only watch about 5 hours of "quality" TV a week, the cost per hour would be very high.
Next stop: Home Depot for some Cerulean Blue paint for my bedroom. It's taken us two weeks to strip the clown wallpaper, and there's still a lot of patching to be done where the wallboard covering came off with the (unusually difficult) paper, but it feels good to actually have some paint. It's the blue of the sky just before dark, the winter blue of the Northeast with low humidity and a tinge of green where the Sun just set. Perhaps I will put up some of those phosporescent stars....
Across the street to IKEA. Our first visit, though I bought some of my furniture in Vancouver there. The store is essentially a people-processing system inside a warehouse -- you go up an escalator, then are directed down a curvilinear sales path through hundreds of sample rooms. Then you go down again and are directed through huge floor of smaller merchandise like lamps and linens, before finally being dumped at a checkout line. There are many opportunities to shorten your route, so if you regularly shop there you can shortcut through to what you want quickly, but it's not a quick in-out sort of place.
We ran into Tor, a nice guy I used to go out with, somewhere in the dining rooms tables. As usual he was "on" -- he's always doing a performance. But he looked great and I'm always happy to see a friend in a sea of families and other strange people. The last time I saw him was while I was having lunch at an outdoor cafe with Mr. Stanford-Hospital-CFO, and I swore up and down we'd get together sometime, and of course we haven't. [guilt guilt guilt]
We found a nice sales person of the pass-for-Swedish-female variety in the kitchens area and ordered our two 36" wall cabinets for $102. After a 15-minute wait for the warehouse forklift to bring them, we were out -- two hours after entering. I hadn't had lunch and by the time we got back home I was weak. After eating I was too tired to move. Why is shopping -- especially in crowds -- more draining to me than an 18-mile run? Who knows. But that's why I do most of my shopping on the net now.
Then it was off to the gym to force myself to do deadlifts. I eased down to 225#, 15 reps, 5 sets. My back is numb.
So today we drove up to East Palo Alto to hit Home Depot and IKEA. The primary motivation: new cabinets for the laundry/utility room, which currently has some sad shelving which looks cluttered. My compulsive partner wants everything as neat and put away as possible, so open shelves turn him off. IKEA sells some cheap but acceptably finished plain cabinets -- same price as utility cabinets at OSH, but much better built.
First we stopped at Best Buy, where we looked at HD plasma TVs. We picked out a few we liked -- cost about $8K. Knowing that these prices will drop 30% a year for years makes such a purchase rather foolish unless you're a corporate officer. But the pictures are stunning; Tivo/Directv will have HDTV/Tivo available in a few months, so it's all getting pretty practical. Maybe next year.... and since we only watch about 5 hours of "quality" TV a week, the cost per hour would be very high.
Next stop: Home Depot for some Cerulean Blue paint for my bedroom. It's taken us two weeks to strip the clown wallpaper, and there's still a lot of patching to be done where the wallboard covering came off with the (unusually difficult) paper, but it feels good to actually have some paint. It's the blue of the sky just before dark, the winter blue of the Northeast with low humidity and a tinge of green where the Sun just set. Perhaps I will put up some of those phosporescent stars....
Across the street to IKEA. Our first visit, though I bought some of my furniture in Vancouver there. The store is essentially a people-processing system inside a warehouse -- you go up an escalator, then are directed down a curvilinear sales path through hundreds of sample rooms. Then you go down again and are directed through huge floor of smaller merchandise like lamps and linens, before finally being dumped at a checkout line. There are many opportunities to shorten your route, so if you regularly shop there you can shortcut through to what you want quickly, but it's not a quick in-out sort of place.
We ran into Tor, a nice guy I used to go out with, somewhere in the dining rooms tables. As usual he was "on" -- he's always doing a performance. But he looked great and I'm always happy to see a friend in a sea of families and other strange people. The last time I saw him was while I was having lunch at an outdoor cafe with Mr. Stanford-Hospital-CFO, and I swore up and down we'd get together sometime, and of course we haven't. [guilt guilt guilt]
We found a nice sales person of the pass-for-Swedish-female variety in the kitchens area and ordered our two 36" wall cabinets for $102. After a 15-minute wait for the warehouse forklift to bring them, we were out -- two hours after entering. I hadn't had lunch and by the time we got back home I was weak. After eating I was too tired to move. Why is shopping -- especially in crowds -- more draining to me than an 18-mile run? Who knows. But that's why I do most of my shopping on the net now.
Then it was off to the gym to force myself to do deadlifts. I eased down to 225#, 15 reps, 5 sets. My back is numb.
