Blue Store, Meet Red State

Yesterday was really great. I never thought that shopping could be so much fun. We ended up spending 5 and a half hours (!) at IKEA. About an hour and 15 minutes of that was eating lunch. I escaped with minimal damage, the only things I bought were a $10 wine rack, some chocolate wafer things for Mabel, and a box of cookies (I am not sure why I bought these cookies, no one else wanted to eat any of them and I now have a giant box of cookies that I don’t really want or need to eat - impulse buying sucks!). It was interesting how they have the Swedish names for all of the items. Some of them are really funny like ‘Muck’. The wine rack I bought is called ‘Vurm’. Mabel couldn’t stop laughing over ‘Skrud’. I guess it just goes to show you how stupid furniture names are because here they don't mean a thing. Usually it's "Yes, I would like to see the Buttress of Windsor in the Camel Hump brown" or somesuch. Whatever. I've also now been inspired to create a children's cartoon called 'Billy Bookcase': "Hey kids, want to read a book? Well, gather 'round 'ol Billy!" Just imagine the Mr. Hankey voice.

The store was pretty crowded, and usually I can’t handle being around that many people for that long, but I guess I was having too much fun to be bothered by it. Lunch was kind of fun, it was like being back at the school cafeteria where you get a tray and go through the line. I’m now up on Lingonberries, I had the Lingonberry Tort, Lingonberry Juice, and Lingonberry Jam. I would say that if you have any interest at all in furniture or home decorating, the trip to IKEA is worth it. To those of you who have had IKEA forever, you may think "Why is everyone in Texas making such a big deal out of IKEA?". Well, us yokels have only had our store for 2 months. I'm sure we'll become as jaded as everyone else after a while.

I pretty much went in with the attitude that I didn’t really need to buy anything right now, so I didn’t get my heart set on buying anything major. I definitely would like to go back sometime. Everyone seemed pretty exhausted at the end of the day. I thought I was feeling OK until I started my drive home, and then I realized that I was pretty wiped out too. I didn’t really learn too much more about what makes Mabel tick – a giant furniture store is not exactly the best place for intimate conversation. Hopefully I won’t have to wait 5 weeks to go out with her again (I need to ask about the Aimee Mann concert).