I Need a Weekend

Yes, suppsedly, the weekend just ended, but can't I apply to get another one or something? Unfortunately, Liz and I didn't make it home this weekend (weather report was ugly and we didn't feel like getting caught driving in freezing rain). We were hoping to come up for the Hansen family Christmas party, but no such luck. Having a weekend "off," Liz and I set out to get some stuff done around the house.

Saturday morning, we hopped in our dope ride and drove up to the cities. Apparently, there's some furniture store up there called IKEA that Liz wanted to check out. We were still trying to find some chairs for our basement movies theater. Little did I know that IKEA is apparently ginormous (that's the word of the day, for those keeping score at home). The entire store in on concrete "stilts" and you park under the building. Then, once you get inside, you walk through two huge floors of furniture displays. Fnially, you get into a warehouse the size of Clintonville and find the stuff you want to buy and take it home. We found a couple chairs and a new light fixture for the basement.

They had a special deal running - spend over $100 and you get a free Christmas tree. Getting a tree was supposed to be our next errand upon returning to Rochester, but this seemed like a good idea. Heck, it was a free tree. All of the trees were wrapped up tight as can be, so you couldn't see what any of em looked like and I was thoroughly expecting to get home only to find that we brought home a Charlie Brown tree. To my amazement, the tree is gorgeous. Sure beats the prices of most trees in Rochester (I think Lion's Club sells 'em for $100+ over by Wal-Mart). Heck, free beats most anything.

So, we made it back from the cities by mid-afternoon and got the tree up in the living room. Next project? Putting up lights on the house. This involved plenty of scaling a ladder and hanging out in the cold. Fortunately, Saturday wasn't too bad. We now have lights on the house, wreaths in the windows, and some "net" lights on our shrubberies (insert funny line from Monty Python here).

We finished putting up the lights about the same time it got dark so we retired to the indoors to continue our day. Next up were the chairs we had bought. These are the types of chairs that require "some assembly" (meaning that they give you a bunch of chunks of wood and some bolts). They weren't too hard to put together, but it took a little while. Once the chairs were finished, we moved upstairs to work on our new (did I mention it was free?) Christmas tree. We got the decorations on and, finally, were ready to call it a night, more or less. We finished with a few beers and some online games with Dave and Nate.

Yesterday was a pretty blah day. Liz and I slept in and, after grabbing some lunch, we worked on getting the new light fixture up in the basement. What a total pain in the ass. Liz had gotten some "pseudo-track lighting" fixture that was horribly painful to install. It took us a couple hours, at least. It's up now, but I sure hope it never has to come down. :(

The Packers were generally sickening but somehow managed to come away with a win. I guess it's fortunate that Joey Harrington is horrible, too. A few more gamey games with Nate and Dave and that was it for our weekend.

Tonight, I'll probably watch Monday Night Football, even though it involves two teams that aren't in the playoff race and I don't especially care about. Even still, Monday Night Football is still much better than most of the other garbage on TV.

Yeah, so that was all useless and stuff and I've got nothing important to say, so I'll be going now. Ta-ta.

Corey