As some of you may know we have recently bought a “spring and summer” residence in Bend, Or., and thus have officially joined the ranks of “snowbirds” and will migrate to AZ with the rest of the pack sometime soon or at least by the end of September due to the pickleball tournaments which begin in St. George, Phoenix and other places of otherwise limited interest soon thereafter. However you cut it, though, moving into a new house, even one you intend only to occupy half the year, is a big deal, especially when you’ve recently given away at least half of the stuff you’ve had in storage for years just to cut down the fiscal bleeding from the monthly bites of the perpetually hungry storage units.

I’m not sure what you did the last time you moved into a new house but what we did was head for Costco. There was stuff we had to have…a couch in the living room, some office furniture, perhaps a bed….and we hoped they would have it, and in fact they did, and it all worked out well, except for the office furniture part. Did you know that you can buy stuff that’s labeled “easy to assemble” that actually has 54 major wood parts and over 300 pieces of hardware? All truth, and that stuff, no matter how good you are, is gonna take you a couple of days to assemble, and at the end you have furniture that’s too heavy to move, so if anybody besides us ever owns this house I bet they will own this same piece of furniture because I sure as heck know I’m not disassembling it, except perhaps with an ax.

Towards the end there was one step that I thought (even at the time) was especially amusing. Basically it was the installation of the “tower”, a piece consisting of a three-shelf mini-bookcase-looking thing about three feet tall and a foot-and-a-little wide. Since the overall construction is an odd combination of iron- or rubber-wood (very heavy) and ultra-dense fiberboard (even heavier) even this relatively small tower is, you guessed it, heavy. And for some unknown reason, where every other major piece is fitted together with metal dowels that snap into metal locking hubs, n this one piece sits on the desk with nothing more to secure it than six glue-strips, the backing of which you remove just before you put it into place. I thought this was odd….clearly glue wasn’t enough to hold a heavy piece in place….until Irene and I man-handled it onto the desk at which point it sucked onto the desk like a huge abalone on a rock, stuck like it would be there until the end of time, actually all good except that it was stuck in the wrong place by about half an inch, which to Irene and my perfectionists’ eyes was a miss as good as a mile. If you ever actually have been abalone diving you know how tough it is to pry one off its rock, right? It was twice that tough to get this thing to move, and the sound it made when it pried loose sent both Spryro the boy-dog and K.C. the girl-cat running at full speed for cover. I would have sworn it was taking the surface off the furniture at least, but it didn’t, and eventually all was well and it was properly re-secured, this time in its proper spot.

All is well  in truth, now, and I write to you from that very desk, and it doesn’t look awesome but pretty good, and I bet you, when you visit, can’t find where the “tower” initially went. Consider this your invitation.