It’s true, I’m not a huge fan of Ikea. They’ve definitely improved over the years; these days I make a point to avoid their upholstered items and bed linens. Their fabrics are just very cheap and thin, and I can’t afford to replace a couch every two years, even if the darn thing was only $300. Sometimes I will find things there that I really do like. If you need furniture on the cheap, it’s a good place to go. While some of their stuff is low quality and cheaply made, some of it is pretty good.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ikea, let me give you a brief summary. Their furniture all comes in boxes and you have to assemble it yourself; that’s partly what makes it so affordable. Wikipedia incorrectly states that they pioneered flat-packing furniture for shipping. This is definitely how they do it, packing huge furniture items in pieces in huge boxes. The size of the boxes are incorrectly stated on their website (this tidbit will come back later in the story) and you will need to either buy on the website and pay for shipping or haul your furniture home and assemble. Our first inclination was to pay shipping, because we do not live near an Ikea. The nearest one is outside Toronto, about a 2 1/2 hour drive, but you have to deal with passports and customs. After that, everything else is a 5 – 6 hour drive. One way. So we decided to order online and pay for shipping.

For the last few weeks, Tom and I have been scouring the Ikea website for desks. We picked out a couple we liked, measured out our computer room, and used blue painter’s tape on the floor to see how everything lay out. Next, we ordered our desks. Check out time: Furniture total came to about $250. Tom checks out, puts in his name, number, address and email address…

And that’s it. No request for credit card, no total with tax and shipping. Instead, he gets a screen saying someone is manually working on this and he’ll be contacted later with the total.

Um, what?

So the next day Tom calls to find out what the story is. As it turns out, the shipping is just as much as the furniture: $250. Tom tells them to forget it, we’re not paying that. He was all bummed and annoyed, and I didn’t want him to be bummed, so I suggested the dumbest of all ideas: Hey, let’s get in a car first thing tomorrow morning and drive to PA.

So that’s what we did. We emptied my car, Tom measured the trunk + space with my rear seats down, added up the size of the packages as quoted on the website, and we drove to Pittsburgh. The first part of the drive wasn’t so bad. We were in the car by 6am. Not a single coffee shop on I-90 on the way. They must have all closed in the last year or so. I had to go with an over-sugared cup of something from Dunkin Donuts. But it was fun and we had a good time.

Then we arrive.

Okay, so we have fun shopping around. We get our desks, an entertainment center so I can have a console game area up in the computer room (wee!) and a bunch of other little things like cheap art, lamps, lampshades, that sort of thing. Then we check out. We take our boxes out to the car. I back the car up to the loading area and…

Doesn’t fit. The boxes are bigger than what was stated on the website. So we struggle for a while, trying to make it work. I thought it was like a half hour but Tom swears it was more like an hour. We were such a spectacle that people were stopping to stare. One Asian couple stopped to look at what we were doing, the woman said something in another language while shaking her head, then walked off. I don’t speak whatever language it was, but I’m pretty sure she said, “Look at those idiots who bought too much and can’t get it home.” Finally, we said there was no way to get this stuff home except to open up boxes and shuffle it all, one by one, into the car. So that’s what we did. Tom’s bookcase was by far the biggest box, so we took it out of the package and slipped the wooden planks into the back.

Sure enough, it fit. If we hadn’t had to deal with that, we would have been out of there a lot sooner, but we ended up being there for almost five hours. We arrived at home around 10:00, and I immediately crashed. The next day we came home from church and set about building the furniture. Everything looks fantastic and I’m so happy we did it. I need to paint pretty badly, but other than that the room looks great. Will try to get pictures up soon.

I know what you’re thinking: AGAIN?

Yeah, and unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots. As I said earlier, I’ve been wanting to play some new games and have been tinkering around with a few others. Inexplicably, I loaded up Hellgate again. And every day, Tom would say, “Oh, so you’re playing that game that you hate?”

Yep.

So I made another sword chick and started chopping up post-apocalyptic London. Her name: SnoCone. (Pink Cupcake was taken by another toon, so I had to go with SnoCone.) Things were going relatively well for an entire 30 levels — yes, I was level 30! Then I got to the final “Test” quest, where you take control of an obnoxiously inept robot and blast your way through a street. When you get the robot to the end of the street, regardless of whether or not you killed anything at all in your path, you win, hooray.

Only I was so annoyed with said inept robot that I clicked the option to exit the robot and restart the quest. I ended up back at the beginning of the street, out of the robot. And that was fine except that I HAD NO BODY. No matter what I did, I had no body. I was just a mindless essence floating around, unable to do anything. I couldn’t even get into the portal. So I quit out of the game and when I came back… My quest log showed I was in the middle of the quest and NOTHING would let me get back into the robot, because apparently the game thought I was still inside the robot. I killed everything on my own and ran to the end of the street, stood in the portal where the robot is supposed to go… Nothing. Needless to say, this is one of those disastrous, show-stopping bugs that the game was so widely criticized for.

So I did the desperate thing that you know you are absolutely NOT supposed to do (I don’t even know why they make it an allowable option): I abandoned the main story quest line.

Which abandoned everything I had done up until that point. There is no way to get the original quest back, because the original quest line begins in a small training area that is closed off once you leave the area.

Level 30! No way to progress the game any further!!! What a piece of crap!!!!!! And you know what the worst part of all is????

I started a new swordmaster named SlapChop.

You’re right, you’re right. I should have named her MissParsley.

For a long time now, Tom and I have been admiring the Blik wall decals from afar. I toyed around with the idea of putting the Space Invaders decals in our long stairwell, but since abandoned the idea because it just seems slightly inappropriate beauty-wise and also because the larger decals that would be best in the stairwell are really expensive.

I guess I had missed seeing the Invader Re-Stik decals, which are even better than the stickers because you can peel them off and reuse them again. Geekology mentioned they were on sale, so I rushed right over and bought a pack.

Whoever threw these stickers on the wall has obviously never played a game of Space Invaders.

The Re-Stick option is $25.00 for a pack with pretty speedy shipping. The package was sitting on our doorstep when Tom got home yesterday. I left him to his own devices and…

…twenty minutes later our computer room had been invaded.

The walls now need to be painted, but the whole thing is giving me a pretty good giggle.