Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

I got a couch

Recently I finally bought a couch for my studio space - after over two years of first moving in. FYI: the inflation crisis have reached the furniture space as well. I had no idea simple armchairs are so expensive. Even the vaunted IKEA value pricing cannot salve the situation. You’re looking at $400 starting for a typical chair. Get additive like I did - I bought a chaise-style lounge chair with side armrests - and the final bill was over $900. This thing had better last a very long time.

The primary reason for getting the chaise is so I can relax in front of the television. Now that I’ve converted to sitting on the floor for my office/workstation desk, I need an actual chair for entertainment watching (I no longer have an office chair). It is indeed nice to be able to lounge on a fat couch after a hard day’s work, or on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Perhaps I can even take a nap! I loathe to get in bed without first showering, so I could never take naps on my actual bed. I realize most other folks don’t have such quirky idiosyncrasy.

A comfy couch does introduce a new problem: utter laziness. Soon as I collapse into the chaise’s warm embrace, I really don’t want to get out of it. Just this past week alone, I missed two days of morning writing, simply because I lounged on the chair first to drink the morning coffee. It’s too easy to zone out and be lackadaisical. Which is why I’m typing this out right now, on a Saturday - got to make up for the missed days!

I think the strategy going forward is to only be on the couch after I’ve done the day’s work. The enjoyment of doing nothing should only come after having done something. There should be no reward without first the work!

Grayscale.

A truck when you need it

I don’t always buy furniture (my room is tiny), but when I do, I lament the fact I don’t have a proper vehicle to transport anything big. The tiny backseats of a BMW M2 may fold down, but the trunk aperture is so narrow that I can’t even fit a typical office task chair through the opening. I get why SUVs and trucks are so popular: you may only need the carrying capacity maybe once or twice a year, but damn if it isn’t handy when you do need to ferry something huge.

So instead going to grab the new couch from IKEA directly, I paid for shipping like a rich person who can’t be bothered to waste time like that. Admittedly it sucks to pay for any shipping at all when I am so used to free shipping on even the bulkiest items from Amazon (100 pound television set is just fine and free). But I wouldn’t buy staple furniture pieces on Amazon: no way I’m plopping down thousands of dollars on an item I’m presumably keeping for decades without first laying eyes and butt on it.

Speaking of IKEA, it is opening up a store in San Francisco soon. The problem is, the location is on Market St. downtown right near the twitter headquarters. Also known as drug-dealing central to us locals. The Whole Foods nearby just announced it’s shutting down (after grand opening less than one year) due to the deteriorating conditions in the surrounding area, and the rampant theft that occurs daily. Unless San Francisco starts actually enforcing those type of quality-of-life laws, there’s no way an IKEA store will last very long there.

There’s also the issue of parking downtown. I guess that particular IKEA store won’t be selling too many bulky items. From the outside there doesn’t seem to be any space at all for the typical monolithic parking structure. How are people going to load their Billy bookcases? It’ll be interesting to see. I for one will continue to go to the store in East Palo Alto. That is, when I’m not buying something too large.

What do you kids know about this?

This is going to be fun

I was at IKEA over the weekend and boy was it packed full of people. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a crowded showroom. There were many a young couple who most likely just purchased a house and are now looking to furnish it. Universities are also starting back up for the fall semester, so there were bunch of those sort of families buying stuff for their beloved undergrad.

And all I wanted to buy was a simple laundry basket! Good thing masks are enforced indoors in this part of the country.

It seems time is going in slow motion this year, because it’s difficult to realize the fall semester is upon us once again. It will be another school year of the unprecedented because our campus is going for a hybrid model. Not in the sense that classes will be physical and streamed online concurrently (we don’t have the money for that). Rather, a third of the classes will be on campus, and the rest will be online; either or. Of course, on the support side this poses a tremendous challenge for us. One that we’ve never done before, and hopefully, the last time we ever do it.

Also hopefully people will realize the pandemic is still very much going on, and to carry some grace for everyone else. It’s almost guaranteed that things will not go smoothly, with many hiccups along the way. I can’t speak for other departments, but for sure our department is trying the best we can. Like most places of employment, we are short-staffed, and going through the pandemic all the same ourselves.

As for me. I’m surprisingly excited for the upcoming semester. Nothing quite like extreme novelty to mix things up and create good learning opportunities. For an entity that’s as cyclical and unchanging as higher education, the past two years have been utterly chaotic (to say the least). Scarcely has there been a dull day at work. That’s a silver lining to COVID I can live with.

The answer is always.

Where's the furniture?

I am moving in two weeks, and part of that process is buying some new pieces of furniture. Nothing mysterious here: I am going to IKEA. I really dig the company’s furniture designs (and the meatballs from the dinning hall), and the notoriously bare instructions don’t flummox me one bit. It’s about convenience, too: for an impatiently anxious person like me, it’s helpful to do all the furniture shopping at one place.

However, there’s a problem: the bloody pandemic. It seems I am amongst the many with grand moving plans during these times (waving goodbye to the folks leaving this great state of California), so there’s a bit of a shortage at IKEA. Friends of mine went there a few weeks ago in hopes to buy some pieces, but returned home empty handed because the ones they want were on backorder. I’ve got my fingers crossed that in two weeks’ time I won’t encounter the same fate, though I’m quite okay placing the mattress on the floor for some time (hashtag bachelor life).

I don’t need that much new furniture anyways, just a bed frame and a large bookshelf. Ever since I read Marie Kondo I’ve tried to keep personal items to a minimal, so in terms of what I need to buy and what I need to move, I don’t really have that much relative to the typical person. Except for books: I am a cruel tyrant to trees because I refuse to stop buying books in paper form, rather than the far more ecological digital format. If I didn’t have physical books, I can move everything I have (sans furniture) in two suitcases.

The 1st of November cannot come fast enough; my impatiently anxious self is eager to get this change done and move on to other beautiful things.

A pair of rabbits.

IKEA trip

The problem with preferring to buy physical copies of books instead of digital (sorry, trees) is that there’s never enough shelf space to house it all. Eventually I have to start shoving the new ones into drawer, and how esthetically pleasing is that? Isn’t the whole point of physical books is to show them off in book cases and shelves? How else are people going to know I am a learned being and I read a ton.

Joking aside, I do enjoy the library-like feel of having books on display, and in the never ending battle to procure more space, this weekend found me at the local IKEA store. There is a sale on the famous ‘Billy’ bookcase, and since I am an Asian always in search fo a bargain, the time was perfect to make the trip to East Palo Alto.

Not forgetting it’s still very much coronavirus season, I was curious at how IKEA is handling the flow of people in and out of the premise. The solution was rather simple: an amusement park-style queuing system, with a snake-like barricade system, and of course, six-feet of space in between each person/familiar group standing. It was indeed like waiting to in line to ride a rollercoaster, right down to the fair warning at the beginning that it’s a 30 minute wait until the absolute front.

Once inside, both sections of the IKEA store - showroom and warehouse - is open, though obviously the people flow is far reduced compared to “normal” times. You can even head straight to the warehouse section now, where previously they always forced you to walk through the showroom first. Knowing precisely where the bookcase I seek was located, I head straight for that aisle and section, bypassing the opportunity to walk through the second floor showroom.

After checkout, it was then another queue - with social distancing - to get into the elevators and back down to the ground floor where everyone was funneled to be parked on; you can’t have too many people stuffed into one like we’ve done previously. I would say the whole shopping experience was a bit strange, but not too much of a bother. I didn’t realize how much I had miss the simple task of heading to a store and buying something (that isn’t groceries).

With a new shelving in hand for more books, I am ready for the at least another year’s worth of purchases. Bring it on.

Morning coffee.