Some Assembly Required

This morning we were supposed to go to lunch with some friends in downtown Tacoma. We printed off the directions from the restaurant's website, picked up our friend Anna, and then proceeded to blunder around downtown Tacoma for twenty-five minutes, completely unable to find the restaurant and cursing directions that sort of assumed you knew where you were going and so left out key instructions as only an idiot without a sense of direction, like, oh, me, would need them. We gave up after about half-an-hour and headed down to the Mandolin Cafe, which is one of my favorite little places to eat. It's a coffee shop/European bistro that features heavy trestle wood tables, a zillion different kinds of tea, gloriously funky art on the walls, and cheesecake that's to die for. They happened to have an excellent jazz band playing that morning and so while we were sorry to miss our friends, we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

After we finished brunch, the four of us headed over to World Market to pick out a couch. Jer and I spent a while debating on whether or not it would fit in our car, and ended up heading home, dropping Anna off at a friend's house, unloading everything out of the car, and laying all the seats down. Jer drove back to World Market without Connor and me, bought the couch, and managed to cram it into the car.

Of course, this couch came with some assembly required. I should have known better than to buy a couch that has the words "Some Assembly Required" on the outside. I believe this is false advertising. What the label really should read is: "Warning! This Item Will Cause You And Your Spouse To Curse A Whole Lot, Probably At Each Other, And You Will Spend The Next Three Hours Fiddling With Little Screws and Wondering Why We Can't All Just Sit On The Floor, Because Who Needs a Stupid $?%#!@* Couch Anyway?" I'm pretty sure that Connor learned some new words today, words which luckily he does not have signs for as I'm not about to try and explain them to him.

We have some prior experience with putting together furniture, as when we moved from Texas out of our 450 square foot apartment and into our current 1100 square foot house we possessed a bed frame, two bookshelves, two dressers, that faithful and blissfully easy to put together futon, two footlockers, and a television. We solved this problem by buying a thousand dollars worth of Ikea furniture (which is A LOT of Ikea furniture) with the intention of assembling it when we got to Washington. If you ever REALLY want to test the strength of your marriage, don't bother having a baby or an affair or something. Just attempt to pound in 900 of those little wooden pegs that come with Ikea furniture over a two day period with only one hammer between you. If you have managed not to kill one another by the time the weekend is over, you're probably good.

Flipping houses? Not going to be an ideal profession for us.

At any rate, we finally got the couch set up, and agreed that it looks pretty awesome, meaning that while Jer probably could have cared less as to whether or not we got a new couch in the first place, he is a fantastic husband and knows when to pick and choose his battles, and now I've already started eyeing our end tables, as MDF isn't really doing much for me these days.

I'll try to find something with no assembly required.

~Jess