IKEA Experience

I've been thinking about getting bar stools for my studio apartment's counter for a long time, and now I have the pressing incentive to actually do it: I'm hosting my parents and my boyfriend for Thanksgiving dinner. I've had my parents over at my place for Thanksgiving before, but I feel this is the first time I'm actually "hosting" dinner. I guess I need to get "civilized" and get some damn bar stools. At least after Thanksgiving I can host happy hour, whenever I'm home on a Friday night and want to kick it with some colleagues.

Have you ever noticed that "Happy Hour" is full of sad, depressing saps? Maybe I don't want to be introducing that into my personal space.

So to dip my toe in the water, my boyfriend took me to IKEA this weekend and we wandered around. Wow. I didn't get anything, but it was a fun experience. We almost had a moment similar to the one in (500) Days of Summer, where Joesph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschanel have a date in IKEA, start making out in one of the display bedrooms, and one of them says to the other, "We have a Chinese family in our bathroom." We walked into a kitchen display and looked into the adjacent living room display, where several people had made themselves at home on the couch.

Have you noticed how *slow* people move through IKEA? Talk about sheeple. There's even the dude or dude-ette who is wide enough for two people and somehow always manages to walk into your path, no matter how you try to get around him/her. The single path is WIDE, and yet shoppers manage to congest the whole flow of traffic.

Tonight I drove down to the IKEA nearest me to obtain the bar stools that will provide dinner seating for four in my little studio. I found some online that would suffice, for half of what other barstools would cost me. The store near me had some in stock, and I thought it would be a neat adventure to navigate IKEA on my own.

Well, I managed to completely irritate several IKEA employees tonight. The bar stools I wanted were not in the self-pick-up area, and I had to figure out how the whole "full pick-up" process worked by consulting an employee each step of the way. I was obviously not one of the IKEA-converted glassy-eyed zombies that roam the aisles. But I successfully obtained the stools, and was so flummoxed that I totally forgot to get a jar of lingonberry jam, frozen potato pancakes, and frozen Swedish meatballs for Scandinavian convenience food experimentation. (That sounds so naughty!)

Ah well. I suppose that will all wait for next time. I spied $5.00 8x10 frames with included mats that will work well for my travel photos that have been begging to be framed for the past 9 months or so. . . . .