readme:james's blog

DIY, part 1

I got around to putting up our new Ikea bed at the weekend, now that the bedroom is pretty much finished. I think I now understand the Ikea principle. All the running around in their warehouse, checking product numbers, picking up 8 different items for one product and lugging awkwardly shaped and sized boxes home reduces the cost.

Sure.

That's just the start of it. Our bed, with an unpronounceable name, came as:

• Head and foot
• Sides
• Two packs of slats
• A heavy metal bar

These were all separate, with separate product codes and placed in separate areas of the warehouse.

I found the instructions in the box with the bed head and foot. Interestingly, there are actually two interchangeable types of metal bar that can be used with this bed. I think. In the interests of internationalisation, Ikea don't have written instructions - they just have a little smiley man getting on with it, looking like an extra from the Pink Panther. This means that people from anywhere in the world will all be as equally confused as to why the screwdriver made him cry.

I got the bed up, anyway. Clippy's paper cousin and me were both grinning at our beds. The final step of screwing little plastic doodahs in sixteen separate, but equally awkward, places on the frame left me sweating.

But wait! No slats! My cartoon guide remained silent.

Opening up the boxes of slats revealed four rubber lengths with sockets, and a number of slats that was uncountable after hours of gruelling bed-making. My little friend returned in another little booklet. This one only had three instructions - 1, fit all the slats into the rubber sockets; 2, (20 minutes and several splinters later) Undo the final step from the last instruction booklet and 3, put the slats on the bed.

I roared. I cursed the dimensionally-challenged guy in the booklet. I think I frightened the dog.

And that's when I understood. You don't pay less at Ikea because you do all the fetching and carrying yourself. All you do is pay in a different way - part of the cost of the furniture is payed by taking part in a weird kind of remote sadism. Someone, somewhere is getting a perverse kind of pleasure at all the huffing and puffing you do lugging boxes, finding parts and trying to use the awkwardly shaped hex tool that comes in the boxes. Even better, sometimes they can have you sweating and swearing getting sixteen little plastic doodahs attached to inconvenient places, only to have you take them all off again.

An odd night

I've never been one of those people that gets confused about who, what or where they are.

When I wake up, I go from unconscious to deciding what to have for breakfast in the time it takes to open my eyelids.

Until last Saturday night.

I woke up sometime in the night feeling cold, uncomfortable and a little confused. I wasn't in my bed, I had my dog's blanket wrapped around me and a rolled up jumper under my head.

Somehow, I'd ended up in the wrong room, on a bed without bedclothes. Without ever noticing I'd done it, I'd rolled up a jumper and wrapped a blanket around me - possibly snatching it from under the poor snoring animal.

I don't remember getting there at all, and only vaguely remember getting back to bed. If it wasn't for the blanket on the floor the next day, I might even have convinced myself that I'd dreamt it.

This could be the start of an exiting journey into sleepwalking. Good job I didn't buy that bear trap off ebay.

DIY, part 2

Steph had a new car, and our drive is a little tight, so I was given the job of taking down part of the wall.

I have to admit that destroying the offending masonry, systematically, brick by brick, with my SDS drill was very satisfying. And loud.

While I was doing this, I also destroyed the home of a number of insects, and things that aren't insects but still have that horrible thing with the legs and the joints and the mandibles. I tried to rehouse them in the next bit of wall, but I don't think they were too happy about it.

One spider in particular looked quite evil. The photo below doesn't really do justice to her menacing appearance, but believe me, she was a mean looking thing. She was as big as my palm, and not in the wispy thin-legged way most large spiders are. I'm sure she even tried attacking the stick I was using to try and herd her into the glass.

Wait, can you herd one of something? Probably not. How about if I say I herded her, her eight strong legs, her beady eyes, her bulbous abdomen and her twitching mandibles into the glass?