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Friday, February 24, 2006

Builders

My dad and I started putting together one of the bookcases I bought at Ikea. It's definitely a two-person job because of the length of some of the pieces and the fact that someone needs to hold them into position while the top and bottom are screwed in. The thing that was kind of funny was the unit came in two boxes and I wasn't sure we were going to have enough space to work in the computer room--it took up that much floor space.

Actually, my dad and I didn't do badly at all, which was a huge surprise. I was expecting to have a couple of Laurel and Hardy build bookcases moments to share here. Didn't happen. The biggest miscue was that we forgot to put the dowels on the bottom of the bookcase. My dad just unscrewed the piece, we put them on and then rescrewed the base to the sides.

In our defense, the directions were all pictures--no words--and some of these little pieces were hard to spot when there are so many things to notice. The other problem we ran into is that each of the little shelf holder things appears to need a screw to hold the shelf. But there were 40 little shelf holder things and only 24 screws. According to the instructions, all we needed was 24, but none of the pictures made it clear which of the shelves received screws and which didn't. It also didn't explain why you wouldn't want a screw in each of the 40 things. Frustrating.

My dad had already put in 20 of the 24 screws before we realized we weren't going to have enough. After a little discussion, we called it quits and decided to bring more screws and put one in each of the plastic shelf holder things. Since the carpenters building my house dropped like 4 million of them and since my dad picked them up, the hardware won't be an issue.

The first couple of steps went quickly and easily, but attaching the plastic shelf things, while not difficult, did end up being time consuming because there were so many of them. The shelving unit is cute and should be able to hold a fair amount of weight per shelf, but I didn't realize what a pain this part of assembly would be. I think--once we have the extra screws--that we should be able to get both units put together this weekend. That should really help with the move since it'll empty out a lot of stuff from my current computer room.

The other project I was hoping to accomplish last night was getting some window film up on the bathroom window. I found a really cool bamboo pattern that I wanted to use there and my dad had picked it up for me. But when we opened the package and started reading the instructions, we realized we needed to bring over more equipment to do this. Like a squeegee, etc. Looks like another weekend project.

Stayed up to watch ice skating at the Olympics last night. I'm dead tired since I ended up with less than 4 hours of sleep, but as I told one of my friends, how can I miss it? When I was 5 or 6 I dreamed of being an Olympic figure skater. After breaking my leg once at 6 and a second time at 9 while I was pursuing this dream, I was forced to admit it wasn't going to happen. But once every 4 years when the Olympics are on, I can be a 5-year-old again and imagine/dream about what if. :-)

I'm a big believer in pursuing dreams. I did it with ice skating and wound up with two casts. I did it with writing and succeeded. Life is short and who wants regrets? If you've got a dream, you have to go for it!