1. Don't tell any friends in the Green party you are buying IKEA products. They'll say IKEA is the "McDonald's of furniture" and that as well as contributing particleboard to landfill, it takes jobs away from local carpenters. You'll then have to contend with feelings of enviro-guilt on top of your construction frustrations. (Note to F. -- I have never put any IKEA furniture in the garbage!)
2. Even if numbers aren't your thing because you're totally artsy, measure the space you want to put the new item into. Chances are, the piece that looked small in the photo of the trendy Stockholm loft will be giant in your highrise apartment.
3. Don't try to make sense out of the extra holes and grooves on the pieces of wood you're using to build your item. It's like junk DNA--not there for any particular reason, just kind of left over from other projects or evolutionary stages.
4. Don't expect the diagrams to be all that obvious. IKEA saves money on translation, copywriting (thanks, eh?) and paper by not putting any copy in the instruction manual. The diagrams are supposed to be multilingual and easy to understand. Many details are missing, however--like the part that should identify the front vs. back of your chest of drawers so you don't nail the back board to the front and end up with ugly nail holes all over the front. (Grrr.)
5. You'll need tools as well, like a toolbox with screwdrivers and a hammer. You'll really be doing these macho tasks such as hammering, screwing in screws, and of course, taking out all the nails and screws you put into the wrong places because you didn't get enough information from the diagrams.
6. If you want to break up with your spouse, building IKEA furniture together is a perfect precipitating event. Men like to ignore the manual and just go with the flow. Women prefer to study those diagrams. Arguments erupt. Relationships end. Do it alone unless there's an agreement to role assignment of boss and minion.
7, Women, don't allow yourself to get too worked up over the fact that the diagrams often only have men in them (unless they're really frumpy-looking women?). At least the IKEA catalogues show men standing over stoves in those stylish kitchens.
8. As for the instructions to attach the piece of furniture to the wall to ensure it won't topple over in the middle of the night, save your energy and ignore them.... It's more fun to live on the edge.
What's a girl with too much time on her hands supposed to do? I read one of those bogus "studies" once that said people who complain and vent regularly are actually psychologically healthier than those who go around purposely thinking happy thoughts all the time. To keep myself sane, I will share my daily fresh hells as an underutilized creative writer living alone with a cat in a pricey downtown condo I can't really afford.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
A day of dysfunctions
The day began ignominiously at 4 a.m. when my cat woke me up by running around in circles on top of the bed and leaping over my head. Although I kept yelling at her to stop, she kept on circling. This was despite my clear memory of putting food in her dish before going to bed to stifle the kitty-alarm-clock. During a lull in her campaign to get me up, I started to fall sleep, only to be jolted awake by a sudden, loud "MEOW!" right in my ear, and the sight of an irate furry face one inch from my eyes. I jumped out of bed and found the cat's food dish empty!
It took me forever to get back to sleep. Around 7 a.m. I was jolted awake again, by a crash from the living room. I rushed out to see that the tower of videotapes with my TV black-switching-box on top had collapsed, leaving the box dangling by its wires--and my ability to catch the digital signal compromised.
I was fuzzy-headed all day, and consequently even more clumsy than usual. At one point as I was dusting a bookcase, I knocked over a pile of books, which fell on a glass of water, knocking it over and flooding the digital box remote control.
Then, with fall here and the heat turned on, I needed to hook up my humidifier to give my place its wintertime rainforest atmosphere. I decided to take the humidifier apart to clean it, and was shocked to see inside a huge amount of what looked like fine, grey sand. I dumped this into the garbage, and then noticed that the sand had corroded all the inner mechanisms--rendering the humidifier useless.
Since I'm determined to find work these days, I apply for many different positions. Some companies have online application forms that "extract" information from your resume and randomly dump it into various fields. This always screws up the information. I've wasted a lot of time reformatting the details of my resume, when really, isn't it easier for HR people to simply print off a resume and read it? This seems like a case of bad use of technology. Just because you can create an online application for jobs doesn't mean you should; it's far less efficient than receiving resumes by email. Time is precious, and I resent redundant user experiences that crunch my time.
The weather that night was horrendous, and I wimped out of walking up to Bloor. This meant enduring the Bathurst streetcar. I got a seat, but then had some guy and his big belly right in my face. Why is it that certain men stand really close to seated women on streetcars so that their crotches are right in our faces? To make things worse, the guy was reading a paperback, which was positioned about two inches from my forehead. It took every ounce of control for me to not activate some of the skills I learned last weekend at my women's self-defense course!
It took me forever to get back to sleep. Around 7 a.m. I was jolted awake again, by a crash from the living room. I rushed out to see that the tower of videotapes with my TV black-switching-box on top had collapsed, leaving the box dangling by its wires--and my ability to catch the digital signal compromised.
I was fuzzy-headed all day, and consequently even more clumsy than usual. At one point as I was dusting a bookcase, I knocked over a pile of books, which fell on a glass of water, knocking it over and flooding the digital box remote control.
Then, with fall here and the heat turned on, I needed to hook up my humidifier to give my place its wintertime rainforest atmosphere. I decided to take the humidifier apart to clean it, and was shocked to see inside a huge amount of what looked like fine, grey sand. I dumped this into the garbage, and then noticed that the sand had corroded all the inner mechanisms--rendering the humidifier useless.
Since I'm determined to find work these days, I apply for many different positions. Some companies have online application forms that "extract" information from your resume and randomly dump it into various fields. This always screws up the information. I've wasted a lot of time reformatting the details of my resume, when really, isn't it easier for HR people to simply print off a resume and read it? This seems like a case of bad use of technology. Just because you can create an online application for jobs doesn't mean you should; it's far less efficient than receiving resumes by email. Time is precious, and I resent redundant user experiences that crunch my time.
The weather that night was horrendous, and I wimped out of walking up to Bloor. This meant enduring the Bathurst streetcar. I got a seat, but then had some guy and his big belly right in my face. Why is it that certain men stand really close to seated women on streetcars so that their crotches are right in our faces? To make things worse, the guy was reading a paperback, which was positioned about two inches from my forehead. It took every ounce of control for me to not activate some of the skills I learned last weekend at my women's self-defense course!
Thursday, October 13, 2011
The brutality of sewing
My grandmother was a self-styled elegant lady who made clothes for family members and their Barbie dolls, raided yards for dandelions to turn into wine, and designed tricky additions to the house--to be executed by her handyman son-in-law, my father. She always kept her temper except when these projects became super-aggravating: once during a particularly annoying wall papering exercise--the paper kept getting gummed up and ripping--and once when she was sewing. "Damn," she said in paroxysms of frustration. I was shocked, and knew there must be something terrible about sewing to drive her to say this forbidden word.
In spite of this early lesson in what activities to avoid, I somehow seem to have taken up sewing as well. It must be a genetic predilection for masochism. Plus. I'm a cheapskate, so why should I pay someone else to do my sewing?
This morning I decided to fix the wasitband on a skirt that's been the victim of my procrastination, sitting in the closet for something like three years.
First I had to pin the waistband onto the skirt, suffering numerous puncture wounds. Then the sewing machine needed to be threaded. But I couldn't remember how, and had to launch a major search for the manual. Naturally, it was not in the file marked "instruction manuals" and not actually with the sewing machine.
Having located this obscure piece of literature in a bag of miscellaneous weird stuff, I then had to follow the instructions, which were written for people with IQs way higher than mine, and illustrated with complicated diagrams that I was told to follow.
The instruction "Increase the tension" seemed apt, as that's exactly what was happening. I was getting more stressed out every second. The bobbin thread got all tangled up. The bobbin itself went flying off the machine, freaking out the cat, who began hissing at the empty sewing machine cover. I couldn't see the hole in the needle to put the thread through, even with all the lights in the place blazing brillantly.
At last the machine was ready, and I carefully sewed on the waistband, narrowing avoiding sewing my fingers. I vowed to never again attempt such a brutal feat. But now I'm thinking it wasn't really so bad....maybe I could even design a line of funky hats and bags and sell them online.....
In spite of this early lesson in what activities to avoid, I somehow seem to have taken up sewing as well. It must be a genetic predilection for masochism. Plus. I'm a cheapskate, so why should I pay someone else to do my sewing?
This morning I decided to fix the wasitband on a skirt that's been the victim of my procrastination, sitting in the closet for something like three years.
First I had to pin the waistband onto the skirt, suffering numerous puncture wounds. Then the sewing machine needed to be threaded. But I couldn't remember how, and had to launch a major search for the manual. Naturally, it was not in the file marked "instruction manuals" and not actually with the sewing machine.
Having located this obscure piece of literature in a bag of miscellaneous weird stuff, I then had to follow the instructions, which were written for people with IQs way higher than mine, and illustrated with complicated diagrams that I was told to follow.
The instruction "Increase the tension" seemed apt, as that's exactly what was happening. I was getting more stressed out every second. The bobbin thread got all tangled up. The bobbin itself went flying off the machine, freaking out the cat, who began hissing at the empty sewing machine cover. I couldn't see the hole in the needle to put the thread through, even with all the lights in the place blazing brillantly.
At last the machine was ready, and I carefully sewed on the waistband, narrowing avoiding sewing my fingers. I vowed to never again attempt such a brutal feat. But now I'm thinking it wasn't really so bad....maybe I could even design a line of funky hats and bags and sell them online.....
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Technology ticks me off
I used to be an early adopter of technology (I bought one of the very first iMacs!) but lately I've begun to feel completely out of fashion. My only consolation is that if I hang onto my old technology long enough, it will become retro-chic and make me feel trendy again. Sort of like the people you see on the street wearing out-of-date clothing and hairstyles--you can't tell if they're leading-edge and ironic or just so out of it they don't realize the fashion train has left the station.
Built-in obsolescence really bugs me. I have a completely functioning iMac--with a turquoise monitor and hockey-puck mouse--that's now incompatible with all updated software and Internet browsers. Plus, it rejects my new iPod. Almost everything launched after 2003 makes my computer crash. I can't even download video from my video camera to my iMac. But that's another story, with a lesson for anyone considering making a major technology purchase after going out for drinks: don't do it!
As for my TV, until a month ago I had three sets of bunny-ear antennae set up to tune in about six TV channels. Then all the TV stations went digital, forcing me to spend $67 on a special box to convert digital signals to analog for my old TV. Sometimes the box works, and sometimes it doesn't. When the signal isn't strong enough, the broken mosaic images on my screen make everyone look like monsters in a horror movie, with disintegrating flesh and unidentifiable things crawling on them.
Not owning a mobile phone has become one of my personality quirks that I'm proud of. However, as a freelancer, I now realize I need to be accessible to clients. So last month I went to Wind Mobile for their special smartphone deal, and was ignored by the sales people. I walked out. Down the street at Public Mobile, no one was even in the store. Should I just give up?
A friend of mine may have the right idea. He's simply dropped out of the computer age. This week I got a typewritten note from him in the mail! I'm not sure where he's going to find replacement ribbons for his typewriter, but there must be some somewhere mouldering in someone's basement.
Built-in obsolescence really bugs me. I have a completely functioning iMac--with a turquoise monitor and hockey-puck mouse--that's now incompatible with all updated software and Internet browsers. Plus, it rejects my new iPod. Almost everything launched after 2003 makes my computer crash. I can't even download video from my video camera to my iMac. But that's another story, with a lesson for anyone considering making a major technology purchase after going out for drinks: don't do it!
As for my TV, until a month ago I had three sets of bunny-ear antennae set up to tune in about six TV channels. Then all the TV stations went digital, forcing me to spend $67 on a special box to convert digital signals to analog for my old TV. Sometimes the box works, and sometimes it doesn't. When the signal isn't strong enough, the broken mosaic images on my screen make everyone look like monsters in a horror movie, with disintegrating flesh and unidentifiable things crawling on them.
Not owning a mobile phone has become one of my personality quirks that I'm proud of. However, as a freelancer, I now realize I need to be accessible to clients. So last month I went to Wind Mobile for their special smartphone deal, and was ignored by the sales people. I walked out. Down the street at Public Mobile, no one was even in the store. Should I just give up?
A friend of mine may have the right idea. He's simply dropped out of the computer age. This week I got a typewritten note from him in the mail! I'm not sure where he's going to find replacement ribbons for his typewriter, but there must be some somewhere mouldering in someone's basement.
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