Getting The Christmas Goose Early

My wife dragged me out to Ikea today.

She actually met me there on my way home from work. She wanted to show me couches. She had had enough of the smelly old broken-down couch that we'd been living with for the last while. My older son and I have plopped down into it with all of our considerable weight too many times, and cracked the frame. And I think either the cat...or the Little Guy...peed on it at least once, probably more than once. Then there's this, Little's art projects that he'd completed on the couch.

It was uncomfortable, smelly, ugly, and damaged to a huge degree, and my wife didn't want to put up with it any more.

So, she showcased several couches for me (she'd been here to look at them before), and we decided on a particular one. We hadn't really planned on buying it today, though. This was supposed to be just a look and see kind of thing, so we were a little unprepared. We didn't really have transportation that would fit an entire couch in there. Instead, we had to use the twine that Ikea provides to tie the part that wouldn't fit inside the car onto the roof.

 I wasn't particularly pleased with the idea. I'm not much in the way of tying knots. I somehow squeaked by on the requirements for knot tying in Boy Scouts without really learning them. I think I did it more like when you cram for a test, and fill your head with knowledge that will remain there for about twenty-four hours until you take the test, and then by the next day you've forgotten it all.

On top of that, I've done hundreds of news stories over the years about people who didn't secure their loads to their cars well enough, and had them fall off and kill the people behind them. So, pictures like these are going through my mind as I tie this box to our roof with more and more and more twine.

My wife drove the car, and she did it slowly at my insistence. I followed her in my car all the way home, hoping to at least make sure that if any car was damaged by this box coming off it was our own, and therefore no one would press charges. And, miracle of miracles, we made it safe and sound.

She was so happy. She got her couch. It wasn't quite Christmas yet, but she'd already gotten her goose. She was enjoying her Christmas present on December 19th. Lucky girl.

Well, sort of lucky. This was an Ikea couch after all, so she still had to assemble it. A few days later, and our family room looked (and smelled) much better.