Got home, put the water on the stove for a pasta supper, thought: while the water’s boiling, I could get a few pieces of the wardrobe upstairs. Yesterday the surly staff of Home Depot dropped off three boxes, each containing one disassembled wardrobe. It’s a neat, clean example of the three basic classes:
1. People who deliver disassembled wardrobe kits
2. People to whom they are delivered, and who could have chosen the preassembly option, but wanted to be prudent
3. People who wouldn’t touch that particle-board melamine formaldehyde-soaked crap with a three-foot ancestral cane, handed down through the generations from Sir Horace Whynging himself
Being in the second group, I had to assemble these things some day, but that meant getting them in the house. Each of the boxes weighed 162 pounds. Said so on the box. “Team Lift!” it said. I have no team. I am my team. I managed to drag one into the porch, but I could feel all available leg, back and groin muscles exploding as I did so. The other two I shoved in the garage. Later.
While the water boiled, then, perhaps I could get a few portions of the porch box upstairs. It would please my wife, who fears, correctly, that anything stored in the garage will remain there, untouched, for the duration of my life.
At 5:05 I got the first piece upstairs.
It is now 11:11. All pieces are upstairs and assembled. I paused for supper and a 20 minute nap, but otherwise it’s been steady work. And now I have to go do other jobs that require my attention. |
