Priorities, Pillows, Sarcastic Eight-Year-Olds

I think it tells something about me, the results of this latest adventure. We acquire a big screen TV with a pretty good surround sound system and a set of bunk beds, and the one thing I have the time and energy to set up after the excursion to get them is over are the bunk beds.

There is some back story. We had to travel 600 miles round trip, pulling a dinky Uhaul trailer over mountain passes and through thick city traffic to get the bunk beds. So perhaps setting them up was a right of conquest. Plus, we had the boys sleeping on the floor because we tossed their old bunk beds out into the alley for the city to cart away a week ago, and we were getting tired of the following exchanges:

Parent: Liam, go make your bed.

Liam: You mean my mattress.

Eight-year-olds shouldn’t be that sarcastic, should they?

An adventure, was this weekend. We got the bunk beds from Carl and Tani. They’re allowing their daughter Tasha to redecorate her room, and she apparently has plans that involve the new Ikea store in Draper. (Last I heard, she’d stuck to her budget by buying the cheapest bed possible, but putting more than $200 worth of decorator pillows on her wish list. What is it with women and pillows? I suppose it’s the same thing as with guys and electronics.) So we had to take the bed apart, firstly to get it out of the house, secondly to get it into the trailer, and thirdly to get it down our basement stairs. The dismantling took about an hour.

On our way home, we swung through Logan, taking our heavy load through Sardine Canyon and really blocking traffic because we could only go so fast pulling eight hundred pounds of bunk bed wood. We stayed the night there, attended an Uncharted design retreat the next day (more on that later, perhaps) then went back to Iona to where our children and big screen TV awaited at their grandparents’ house. Grandpa Griffin already has a new LCD big screen picked out; he was just waiting for the old one to disappear before he bought the new one and brought it in. So we first had to squeeze all those parts in the truck and trailer. That meant taking most of the bunk bed parts out and tying them down in the truck bed, setting the TV on its side and then cramming it and all the speakers and such into the trailer. Poor Michelle had to ride home with the surround sound unit and the DVD/VCR combo on her lap, as the kids chattered endlessly in the “king” cab portion of our tiny Toyota pickup. I got all the talking-to I needed from the kids in that 45-minute drive home than we’d missed in the previous two days.

So yeah, the beds are set up, and the TV and various parts lay strewn across the floor of the living room. I nearly stayed home from work today so I could finish a bit of homework and then set up the TV, but I thought better of it, especially since there’s no way in heck I could pass that idea through spousal Priority Control. So now I’m in a holding pattern of sorts. I think I’ll wait until Michelle is sick of all the components lying around. Then she’ll spearhead getting the videocassettes off the entertainment center so we can move all that stuff out (including old TV, VCR, DVD, stereo) so the new can go in. We’ll likely keep our DVD player – we can store five in it at one time, versus just the one. Don’t know yet where we’ll put the entertainment center. Ooh. Maybe in our bedroom. That’s all we need there, eh?