Day 1133

After meeting with my financial adviser and confirming that I was not a rich man, I went up to Ikea and bought a cheap floor lamp. I'm sure that some of you have shopped at Ikea before. The stores are enormous and I always get lost in them. I usually get lost right after I pick up something heavy and then spend the next fifteen minutes looking for the check out aisles. Things are incredibly cheap at Ikea. That's why the stores are always crowded. People don't even care that most of the stuff is pure crap and will probably break before you figure out how to assemble it. It's just incredibly cheap, so you fill your buggies like everyone else. Ikea doesn't miss a trick. If you get hungry while you're lost in the store, they'll sell you some lunch. If you need something to carry your heavy purchases out to the car, they'll sell you a shopping bag at the check out counter. Everything is cheap, but nothing is free. I think you could furnish your entire house at Ikea for the same price as a single dining room chair at Design Within Reach.

When I got my floor lamp home, I had to assemble it. You have to assemble everything you buy at Ikea. My fully assembled lamp seemed to lean a bit to the left, but you can't expect perfection from a $29 floor lamp. The high-tech LED bulb I screwed into the socket to complete things actually cost more than the lamp. I still can't figure out why the lamps I was looking at a few weeks ago at the ritzy lighting studio cost $1500 and up, while this somewhat similar lamp cost $29.

Although today was a holiday, Janet and I certainly didn't take advantage of it. She cleaned the house and went to a Zumba class at the gym, while I got lost in the crowds of people buying baby furniture at Ikea. Tomorrow, it's back to work again. I've got a lot of website revisions to make this week, but none of them will make me much money. I was trying to explain to my financial adviser today why designing websites is no longer a winning proposition for me. I'm not sure he understood. He asked why I couldn't start offering cheap template driven sites myself.

I think the garage that did my safety inspection screwed up my car. It's been making an odd rattling noise ever since I got it inspected last week. This is a different kind of rattling noise than the rattling catalytic converter, so now I've got two rattling noises. I guess I'll have to stop by the Land Rover dealer later this week. It's always something.

Myles is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 667

It was a nice day. I got up early to meet the Design Within Reach truck. For some reason, they decided to deliver our new mattress at 8 AM this morning. The mattress arrived compressed in a huge tube. The delivery guys said I was supposed to unseal the tube and the mattress would uncoil and spring back to its original shape. I wasn't sure if this expansion process was gradual or an explosion, so I decided not to open the package until later.

The dogs and I ate breakfast, had a nice walk in the cool Fall weather and then returned to face the large box in the living room with a rolled up king sized mattress inside. I took the tube out of the cardboard box and placed it on top of the existing mattress. This way, if things didn't go as planned when the compressed foam expanded, there wouldn't be other things in the way that could get broken. Sure enough, when I broke the seal on the heavy vinyl tube, the rolled up mattress slowly began to uncoil and return to its original shape. The delivery guys told me that the mattress could take up to 8 hours to fully expand, but it looked pretty normal after just twenty minutes.

I didn't get a single call from clients today, which gave me the time I needed to finally finish updating the animal rescue site I've been working on all week. I added 42 new pages to the site, uploaded everything to the server and then went to Bed Bath and Beyond to look for a mattress pad for the new mattress. Why do mattress pads cost over $100 these days? Probably for the same reasons fry pans and chef knives cost over $100. Whenever I buy something cheap at Bed Bath and Beyond, there are tons of those blue 20% off coupons around the house. Today, when I needed a coupon, I couldn't find any. Oh, well.

Tomorrow is my last physical therapy session. My neck is still a little sore, but the therapy has made a huge difference. I'm really glad I took this route, rather than just trying to mask things with pain pills. If I have the discipline to continue all the exercises they have designed for me, I should be in a lot better shape six months from now.

Puppies are today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 655

We went to the Lake Highlands Octoberfest this afternoon. This event is put on by the Lake Highlands Exchange Club to raise money for the scholarships it provides to the local high school. This year's event took place at the never completed Lake Highlands Town Center. The Town Center is a beautiful development that was supposed to revitalize the entire neighborhood. Unfortunately, the project ran into financial problems during the big financial meltdown of 2008 and was never completed. There is a beautifully landscaped urban park, nice streets and plenty of parking, but no buildings whatsoever. It's a good place to have a neighborhood fundraiser though. I had a grilled bratwurst and a Weizen beer and enjoyed the Sunny Fall afternoon.

We also ordered our new mattress at the Design Within Reach store. Janet liked the same firm mattress I did, so hopefully we'll be getting a little more restful sleep in a few weeks. We didn't ask the dogs which mattress they'd like best. They'll sleep anywhere. Usually right on top of us.

I'm still trying to get caught up on one of the animal rescue websites I manage. After months with no updates whatsoever, these guys decide to send me a ton of new animals they want on their site all at once. There must be twenty-five or thirty new animals and each one needs a page of it's own. It's going to take me four or five days to get everything updated.

I think the physical therapy is actually working. Even after one session I found it was easier to get out of bed this morning and the pain in my neck didn't seem as bad when I walked the dogs this afternoon either. I'll cross my fingers and hope that after a few weeks of these sessions, I'll be able to get back to a normal schedule again.

Tori is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 653

I delivered my picture of Edgar the cat today. On the way home, I stopped by a nearby Design Within Reach store and looked at mattresses. I found one that was just about perfect. I didn't buy it though, because rule number one about mattresses is to never buy one unless both people like it. Now, Janet has got to find time to go to the store and try the mattress too. If she likes it, we'll buy it and then wait and wait and wait as it travels by slow boat from wherever it comes from. That's the thing about buying furniture from a furniture showroom. You can't actually buy what's in the store. I can recall waiting six months for certain pieces of furniture I got at Palazzetti to arrive. The mattress shouldn't take nearly that long. I hope not anyway. A young designer told me that orders usually only take two or three weeks to deliver.

I wrote a watch article today about a watch that one of the popular watch blogs recently said was one of the ugliest watches that had ever been manufactured. Of course I took a much different slant on things in my article. For a brief moment I wondered if I would ruin my reputation by saying great things about a watch that everyone else hated. Then I remembered that I was in advertising. Advertising people can't ruin their reputation. We never had one in the first place.

The physical therapy place called me for the third time to remind me about my appointment tomorrow. Jeez. How am I going to forget to go to this place when my neck hurts? Believe me, I'll be there tomorrow. I hope they come up with a good plan for me, because I'm getting real tired of walking around like I was made of eggshells and plaster. Things are getting a little better though. At least I can turn my head enough now to see the oncoming traffic when I back out of the driveway.

I still haven't gotten around to installing the Avid Media Composer software I got earlier in the week. I still haven't gotten any new video jobs either, so I guess there is no big hurry.

Sweet Pea is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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