November 4, 2006: A Relaxing Weekend in Newark

As planned, this morning was IKEA shopping morning. We got up a little after seven and drove down to Elizabeth around half past eight. We stopped at Burger King for breakfast and then hit the IKEA store shortly after they opened. Getting there really early did help a lot and we were able to go right in and get the Billy bookshelf and a few assorted sundry items that we needed for decorating around the apartment quite quickly and easily. Far better than our previous experience at the store.

On the way out we also did some shopping in the IKEA Swedish grocery store. We discovered delicious Lant Chips along with several types of northernberry preserves like lingonberry (aka cowberry), cloudberry (aka bakeapple) and gooseberry. Very delicious stuff.

We came home to Newark and set to putting together the shelving unit. It was much better construction that the stuff that we are used to buying and very competitively priced. We are very pleased with the quality of the unit. It is able to hold a lot more books than we are used to and it is a lot more attractive. Once that was completed our job was to clean the apartment and to get as much stuff as possible put away now that there is enough shelf space in the apartment. We moved the old, small shelf that had been in the living room into our bedroom.

One project that I attempted today and am now very sorry for having tried is washing the living room throw rug. We got this rug when we first moved to New Jersey and were living in North Brunswick and it has traveled with us to here and we decided that we wanted to wash it before Susan came to visit this week. The original plan was to have taken the rug to a cleaner but that didn’t end up working out so I decided that I would give it the ol’ college try myself. Bad, bad idea. Of course the only place where I could hope to wash the rug was in the shower but that didn’t work at all. It is a fairly large throw rug and when I first put it into the shower everything was going fine until it dawned on me that as the shower water soaked into the rug that the rug would be getting heavier and heavier and very soon it was too heavy for me to lift. Oops. So that ended up turning into a much larger project than I had anticipated. I spent about an hour cleaning the rug just to discover that things like Oreo’s corn starch bone bits were not about to come out of it one way or another. So I am not sure how valuable the whole cleaning process was anyway. Now we are stuck with a rather large, completely water-logged rug that we have no reasonable way to spread out to dry. We are pretty sure that we are going to be stuck throwing the rug away which, in reality, is only so bad. I never liked that rug anyway.

Dominica did a lot of cleaning around the apartment today while I was struggling with the rug. After several hours of working on the apartment we talked and decided that it was time that we acquired a television or a television like device for the apartment so that we would have something to watch movies on since we have been stuck using Dominica’s 19″ computer monitor in the living room “alcove” which is a very cumbersome place to view movies in. So we drove out to Union, NJ which was a total parking lot the entire way. I guess Christmas shopping comes early in New Jersey. We got to Best Buy and found out that they don’t carry any 1080p monitors, just HDTV (1080p is the step above HDTV and is the standard for high quality home theatre now as it is the common output shared between HD-DVD and BluRay as well as the output from video game devices like the X-BOX 360 and the PS3) at least in reasonable sizes like what we are interested in which is between 32″ and 42″. Dad has the 37″ Westinghouse 1080p that he got from Best Buy and he loves it. We were hoping that they would be carrying that model but they no longer carry it in the store and you can only order it. That would really defeat the purpose of the spur of the moment shopping spree that we were on and would not make the television usable by Susan this week.

We settled on just doing some grocery shopping and then we headed back to Newark. We decided to just watch The Wedding Crashers and then headed off to bed. The movie was pretty good. Nothing classic but entertaining.

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