2007-10-03 - 11:15 a.m.

...no lion, no witch, just a wardrobe...

Ugh. I am at home. It is grey and rainy again - in fact, I don't remember when we last had sun. It's already winter in Vancouver, making me miss the brilliance of a NY Autumn as much as I DON'T miss the stifling heat of a NY summer. I'm wearing a sweater and I'm ready to invest in some full-spectrum light bulbs.

K and I had quite the affair of installing a new wardrobe in our open-plan bedroom. Technically, our apartment is large. In reality, is it full of space that cannot be used because there is a plethora of impractical built-in furniture. Half of the living room is consumed by a wood stove that we never use. The built-in shelving and desks are not in places we wish to use them. So we are stuck working our stuff around this OTHER stuff.

Our brilliant idea last week was to buy a wardrobe to serve as a room-divider on the top floor. This way, half of the room can be used for baby -the other half for us. It's not as elegant as giving the kid her own room...but hey, I'm forced to think about the number of people in this world who pack their families into dwellings 1/5th the size of ours. We have it good.

Installing and modifying this wardrobe became an involved, two-day affair. We bought the Swedish wardrobe and discovered it didn't fit in the car --> paid for delivery the following morning. We assembled it. And discovered that the top was 1.8 cm too high to clear the slanted roof --> we had to saw 1.8cm off one side to slide it into position over top of the rim of the chimney that we neglected to measure --> we had to buy a jigsaw --> online consumer investigation of good jigsaws --> trip to hardware store to purchase appropriate power tool.

We also needed to fit the wardrobe with more shelves (what's the deal with 40-cm high shelves? who has clothing that fat?) --> trip to the bandsaw (we are not buying a bandsaw) at a local hardware for the cheapest wood. It wound up taking pretty much the whole day.

In the end, the solution kind of works, although it makes our half of the room so dark that I no longer wake up in the morning. But that was going to happen anyway in Vancouver winter, and I'll just put that full-spectrum light bulb on a timer to wake me up in the morning.

Okay, so now I've successfully avoided discussing the latest bs on laboratory renovations, and also avoided finishing up a lecture for tomorrow - something that I will do now while I enjoy this heavenly cup of coffee (I like coffee again, albeit in small doses.)