The Side Effects of Endorphins

I did not have going to Pottery Barn in a mall in Lynwood on my Bingo Card. I now have been in a mall two times in the last three weeks. That is out side two standard deviations of what is my real life. Linwood is to Seattle’s as Beaverton is to Portland. There is always a weird suburb just outside a cool city. By weird I mean how ridiculously normal these cities are. Every family has 2.2 kids and both claim to be tree cities. Both do have a street named Oak and Spruce.

I digress, as I had to go pick up some furniture from Pottery Barn. I vaguely remember discussing this furniture with my wife, but I swear it wasn’t in a Pottery Barn.

Apparently, these things come in big boxes that I would have to load into Gladys. In case you are wondering Gladys is our RAV4 we bought in Gladstone many years ago.

In order to do that, I had to remove the car seats. Please remember we made this move to Everett so we can be closer to the grandkids. Car seats are far more complicated than they were the first time I couldn’t figure out how to work a car seat. Against the run of play, I figured it out rather quickly. Getting them back in is a battle for another day..

GPS

I made it to the mall in a mere 24+minutes. I’m a little bit humbled by how much I use GPS these days. Driving in a mall parking lot is a skill set I don’t really want to have.. There are some people who own that parking lot. I walked into that store feeling not quite at the top of my game. I simply stuck to the basics and gave them my order number, and they said to meet them on the loading dock in the front of the store.

It was a good thing. I took out the car seat because these boxes were enormous and heavy, and I would have to get them back in the house. The handtruck I used for moving big items is still at the old house. A big box is just a big parallelogram. I devised a method to flip it end-over-end and used a little leverage and got it in the house.

Put it All Together

The shipment consisted of a wooden kitchen table and three wooden chairs. These items were fairly straightforward. The complicated part was how much packaging went in to shipping this thing. I’m embarrassed by how much Styrofoam was in the packaging.. I’ve also become the master of breaking down cardboard for the recycling services. There was plenty of that.

Putting them all together was not all that hard. There were a bunch of nuts and bolts and Allen wrenches and a screwdriver I fetched from my. Semi organized new tool bench.

Repetitive task are not my forte. The hardware for each chair was wrapped in cardboard and plastic. The most complex task is getting these nuts and bolts out of the packaging. Yes I must admit the product was efficiently packed. There is an algorithm how to pack things into boxes, most efficiently and ship them. I wrote a similar algorithm years ago. That is what they did here and not necessarily for the customers convenience. These measures are taken to improve efficiency and the company bottom line.

In total, it took me four hours and those are hours I will never get back. Of course I’d take another two hours to make fun of myself and write about it. But I’m writing this at the table I put together. The table already has paw prints from the cat (Bobo). It’s a nice place to look out the window.

Which reminds me we also got a robot for the kitty litter that needs to be put together. I have prepared for this my entire life.