Swedish Meatballs and Home Improvement

Jen is currently in San Diego and I am stuck here on the island of Manhattan all alone. Hopefully that doesn't come across as jealousy. San Diego is towards the bottom of the list of places I'd like to visit in California. It's not even close to the top of the list of places in California that start with "San" that I'd like to visit. For those curious the list is something like this: San Dimas, San Francisco, San Jose (to see the shark tank), etc.

Jen's whirlwind tidying mission preceded our planned trip to Ikea where we got in around 10:30AM and immediately lost Jen's painstakingly mapped out and measured drawings of our apartment. This was a real morale killer but we still managed to spend over four hours and far more money than I am comfortable writing on some fixings for the apartment.



After a one-hour scouting tour of the store we headed to the cafe which I maintain is the cleanest kitchen I've ever seen in all of my days on this planet. Jen had the Swedish meatballs, which she'd been looking forward to since before our trip to France. I think she may even have longed for the Ikea Swedish meatballs while dining at some of the nicer restaurants we visited on our honeymoon.

The next several hours were spent in Ikea hell. We'd made the ill-advised decision to go to Ikea on Labor Day. We we knew in advance it was a bad idea but given the convenience of where it fell in our schedules we decided to do it anyway. After all that we even took a side trip to Target to pick up a few odds and ends. I would highly advise against that as well. Our original plans even included a trip to Crate & Barrel but thankfully we forgot the gift certificates we were supposed to bring with us to spend there. Perhaps that was our subconscious at work trying to protect us.



When we got back to the city we were unloading when I saw a a brownish blur flying towards me. I jumped back and looked down to see a frog just hanging out on the ground near a fire hydrant. I tried to get close to it and it leaped up and clasped onto the side of the fire hydrant.



Slowly it made its way into the little gap where the side cap of the hydrant is screwed on. This brings the total number of wild frogs that I've seen on the street in New York City to one. I think that may be a new county record.



After getting home I quickly assembled our new bed and Jen quickly ordered take out from Dallas BBQ after we also ditched our plans to stop by a grocery store on the way home. An all-day Ikea expedition will take the ambition right out of anybody. Life would be so much easier if we didn't love that damn store so much.



Before dinner I had decided to break down some boxes using a razor blade, something I do often. Something I do not do often is slip while holding the razor blade and slice my finger open. I was lucky enough to have that happen on this occasion. After debating going to the emergency room for stitches I used my last emergency room visit as a guide and decided not to. It took four hours to get seen when I was nearly dying of some sort of rogue intestinal virus, a little nick on my finger would have kept me there for at least twelve hours. I've worked with sharp knives long enough to know how to bandage it up and move on.



After dinner I put together our new kitchen console and rattled off more creative curse words in thirty minutes than the naval complement of an average battleship blurts out in a twenty-four-hour period. For some reason the screws did not line up with the screw holes and that caused me to sweat profusely while crouching inside a stainless steel cabinet for much of the post-dinner hours. Don't let the smile fool you, I hated life at that moment.



Jen left for San Diego early this morning leaving me to pick up our farm share on my way home from work. Here's what we got this week: 5 ears of corn, 3 red tomato, 2 green zebra tomatoes, 1 yellow tomato, 1 pound potato, 1 head garlic, 4 carrots (the ones that look like parsnips), 2 red peppers, 1 head lettuce, 3 pounds peaches, 1 1/2 pounds green beans, and 1 bunch chard. They are all artfully displayed on our new kitchen console which is only two-thirds complete at this point.



After coming home to an apartment that was in a transition (to put it mildly) and that Jen was not here I opted for an easy meal.



I cooked up some frozen raviolis and served them with some farm share tomato and some sliced cornbread from last night. Just enough to eat quickly then get back to work assembling and cleaning.



Two fingers of this wine we got (because it was Shiraz and had a cool hologram on it, a clear winner in my book) and I am not ready to jump back in the kitchen and tackle another portion of this cabinet assembly.

Sadly for Jen she will not be here to hear my clanging and cursing from the other room. Instead she will be in San Diego which is currently about ten degrees cooler than New York.

Lucky stiff.