Day: October 20, 2003

After the Interior Show, we headed south to IKEA. After last weekend’s crush, I didn’t really think I’d get in and out in one piece without killing at least a few people. But thanks to some advance calling, we found the chest of drawers that they were out of last week, got it into our car, and got it home where it sat in two boxes overnight.

On Sunday after church, Lisa and I started assembly at about 10:30 am. We got the skeleton assembled and broke for lunch at about 12:30, then she turned her attention to the first of what would become seven quarts of tomato sauce (if anyone wants tomatoes, come and pick them from our garden. Please) while I assembled the rest of the bureau. With interruptions, the task took until 5:30. Ye gods.

Finally, though, we have enough storage to hold all our clothes, for the first time in our marriage—until now we’ve been limping along on my bachelor four-drawer chest which, though faithful, isn’t really big enough to hold two people’s stuff.

Saturday was the Seattle Interior Show. Since we didn’t get a call, I think it’s safe to say we didn’t win the grand prize drawing of all Kitchenaid major appliances. So I can say without reservation that the show wasn’t what I expected. I was hoping, based on nothing but the grand prize, for lots of appliances and other things that would allow me to revel in the manly side of home improvement. What I got was interior design, and about forty tile and glass vendors. (Aside: am I the only one that doesn’t get the concept of using tile anywhere but in the bathroom, and maybe the kitchen? or of using little glass mosaic tiles anywhere?)

But we had a good time, and came home with a gorgeous blown-glass colored vase by the partnership that made the glass lampshades that appear in Debra Messing’s office on Will and Grace. That was their line; personally I think the inclusion of some of their pieces in the Museum of Glass is a bigger claim to fame, but hey.

I also found that I’m capable of sleeping in public, thanks to Gretchen Schauffler of Devine Color, who committed the cardinal sin of giving a forty-minute lecture about color in a half-darkened seminar room and not showing any colors. It’s nice to hear about all your past careers, dear, but shut up and talk about paint already.

A gray Monday morning here in Seattle, but I don’t mind. I’m too busy trying to shake off the domesticity of the weekend and gird my loins for the week.

On Friday we went to see Intolerable Cruelty, which got the most out-loud laughs of any movie I’ve seen in years in the sold out theatre. The kids on IMDB think it’s the weakest of the Coen Brothers’ movies, and that might be true—the characters aren’t nearly as quirky, the ending too forced. But on the other hand it’s also the Coens’ first movie in ages where the jokes were firmly grounded in something other than dialect humor. (Not that I minded in the earlier films—“them sirens loved him up and turned him into a horny toad!” being a line for which I will wait years, if necessary, for the time when I can drop it into conversation without forcing the setup—but Simon and Garfunkel on the bagpipes was funnier without being cruel.) Lisa liked it too, which is a stricter criterion of greatness—her sense of humor is a lot less forgiving than mine.