Mini-break to Sweden

Hurrah! Had fun after work; Nancy accompanied me to Ikea for some shopping. This was sort of a mini-break to Sweden for the International Jetsetters on a tight budget. I needed to shop for a new bed to replace the twin beds that I ditched yesterday via charity pick-up.

I knew what I wanted when I got there - a nice queen size bed a nice firm mattress which I had picked out earlier on the Ikea website. I also picked out a bit of living room furniture but more on that some other time.

One of the things I like about the bed are two vertical storage spaces in the headboard - rather unusual, as the spaces are accessed from the top - so you can drop magazines into them I suppose.

It was fun trying out all the mattresses to pick out the one I most fancied. Had the biggest temptation in the bedroom area - there was a round bed, which reminded me of the old James Bond movies. Oooo that is like soo very tempting for my bedroom. The round bed is large enough to roll around on - to say the least. Nancy thought I should give the round bed serious consideration and said 'You know what they say, if you buy the bed HE will come'.

Thought I, 'he will come all right, heh, heh, heh....' I think I might have taken her comment the wrong way. Nancy called Rick (hubby) and he asked if we brought a pea with us so we could properly test out the mattresses on our princess soft skins. HAHAHAHHAAHA!

One of the big attactions with the West Sacramento Ikea is a Swedish restaurant which Nancy & I could not wait to try! So first we did our picking and choosing of furniture on the 2nd floor and then we bought dinner there - cafeteria style. Nancy got cooked salmon with potatoes and two varieties of carrots - yellow and orange. I got a spinach salad with salmon lox & a delish dijon dressing & a slice of loganberry cheesecake. Yum.

After enjoying our little 'taste of Sweden' we went down to the first floor for part II - picking up what we wished to purchase. Very strange! First you look at what you want on the immense 2nd floor showroom & jot down the aisle and bin numbers of what you want to buy. Then you go down to the first floor and pick the unassembled boxed items up and take them to check out.

I was whingy by then and Nancy found some nice guy we decided was named 'Sven' to help me get my purchases together on a cart. 'Sven' was a really sweet guy from somewhere in Africa. Anyway, with his help all my purchases were piled high on a rolly-cart.

I opted to have the lot of it delivered to my house so I made the arrangements.

Nancy bought a cute slatted bench for use by her front door - for Adan and Diego to put their back packs on and store their shoes under. Couldn't find a picture of it but it was very pretty and solid wood, not particle wood. Nancy also got a nice green table cloth and some Swedish goodies - cookies and such and I therefore had to peruse a secondary food area Ikea clevery put by the exit to tempt shopers before they leave. I ended up with salmon pate in a tube, marzapan cake thingies, Swedish licorice fish & a jar of pickled herring. Nummy!

It was a huge wonderful treat to have Nancy to go shopping with. I get so totally bored doing all my shopping by myself all the time. Making the event into a girly outing added a nice element of fun and took all the work out of shopping. Heaven knows I have a ton of shopping to do in the coming weeks.

My new bed and TV stand will arrive next Saturday the 20th, first thing in the morning. I can hardly wait! Especially since I will be sleeping on my eensie couch all week as I gave away the last of the beds in the household.

Progress, more or less

Took today off from work; the Salvation Army is coming by to take the dresser out of my future bedroom and the twin day bed with trundle in the guest room - the day bed I've slept on for the past... year? Year and a half? I'm glad the bed is going. Maybe sleeping on my creepy little couch will spur me on to completing painting and turning my future bedroom into my painted & complete bedroom.

Two years ago - possibly three or four, who keeps count? - my future bedroom was a guest room & it was usually neat & tidy. Then the futon fugged up and voila! The back guestroom became the junk room from hell. More and more stuff piled up, then after a while the stuff began to breed and multipy on its own. Now I can only get into the room armed with a whip, a chair and thoughts of calm submission; thank you Caesar Milan.

With a little bit of luck I will either order a queensized bed or go pick one up at Ikea.

Christmas in May

I've been having fun with my new iPod. I got it a few weeks ago but it was only last Friday that I was able to outfit it for its primary purpose, in-the-field bird identification. On Friday night I installed bird calls onto it for pretty much every North American species that sings, squawks, chirps or tweets. Now, whenever I go birding, if I hear something I don't recognize, I can take a wild shot chirp in the dark at identifying the bird by its song by listening to likely 'suspect' birds on my iPod.

The bird songs I installed are from the Eastern & Western Stokes Field Guide to Bird Song. I used BirdPod Maker software to tweek and arranged the Stokes guide. The BirdPod Maker helps the iPod list the various bird songs by habitat, eastern or western half of the continent, etc.
The Stokes bird song guides were reasonably priced but the BirdPod program was UBER expensive!

Know what I keep my iPod stuff in? A small beaded tan deerskin pouch with a fringe of tin jingles that I made a long time ago - the two together are a perfect mix of my love of the old and new stuff.

Speaking of stuff, about a week ago I received a check and some settlement papers and a chart from State Farm Insurance concerning the theft of my 'stuff' in March, two months ago to the day March. The Statefarm chart listed my stolen items. Each item had its own row with fourteen additional columns of numbers - none of which made any sense whatsoever to me. I am not stupid, but honestly, Clarence Darrel wasn't good enough of a lawyer to figure out the meaning of the chart.

So last night I called the State Farm offices and asked WTF? The explanation from the agent made perfect logical sense and there is NO way I could have discerned as much from reading the damned charts or its accompanying letter. I told the insurance agent they ought to hire people who speak English and can convey information so people can read and understand the chart. Honestly, if that letter & chart were an assignment in an English class the writer would have earned an F for reader comprehension.

The upshot of the letter is let's say my stolen spotting scope had a value of $1,000 dollars in the first column. The policy paid directly to me $500 for the scope. I could, if I wanted, take the $500 and that is that. But as I want a replacement spotting scope I am short $500 for replacement. So what I will do is purchase my $1,000 spotting scope and turn over its receipt for to State Farm who then will dish out a check to me for the outstanding $500.

Now why the heck didn't the letter just say that?

So, now if I like I can go on a shopping spree to replace the remainder of my stolen stuff. The shopping to replace all the stolen stuff is rather like some bizarre sort of Christmas.