Blue Mecca

Sorry for the various gaps in blogging everyone.
While Mike was still off from work, we made a pilgrimage north this week. Shhh, don't tell anyone, after all, we do live in North Carolina, furniture capital of the US. We rented a truck and went to (gasp) Virginia and shopped at (ah!) the big blue mecca, turning around it ritually seven times. We went to Ikea.
It was quite an excursion, planned weeks in advance with thorough poring over the catalog, measuring every nook and cranny, making budget estimates and style decisions. We returned with our load and now are proud owners of more than a dozen Ikea allen wrenches.
Back when we lived in CA, I went to Ikea with Norwegian friend Hanne Sivertsen. For her, it was a little scandinavian vacation, and she happily worded out the furniture names in her singsong voice, so that now, I cannot shop Ikea without Hanne's up-and-down intonations dancing in my head. Billy, Hemnes, Effektiv, Hopen, Ektorp, Muren, they all should be pronounced with the first syllable in a middle C and the second syllable one octave higher. They sound much prettier that way too.
And the first thing we did, arriving home at 9pm on Wednesday, was to build the bed. A king-size wood-slat frame with a Hasselback spring-and-foam mattress and a pad, it's like sleeping on your mother's lap all over again. Ahhh. Since then, it's been an orgy of building, and I have the bumps and scratches to prove it, including a 3-inch scar just inside my hairline where the Ivar unit fell on top of me while I stubbornly refused to wait for Mike to come home or to get cross-braces strapped first.
And the latest news: my container of my dad's furniture has cleared customs and will arrive, here, at Waterside Drive, by the end of this week! Can you believe it?