Of Prairie Dogs and New Dining Room Sets

Yes, it's true. My brother called me a lazy poster. I think it's mostly just because I have nothing funny to say. It's easier to come up with funny stories when people that live upstairs from you have freak chicken defrosting accidents or when jumbo-sized squirrels are challenging you for ownership of the bird feeder.

So maybe I'll tell the stories of my weekend. We had some lovely friends come down to visit us for the big holiday weekend. Saturday night we headed to Baltimore's lovely inner harbor to see a free concert by They Might Be Giants. I love that band and I've listened to them since I was a freshman in high school. This is the second time I've seen them in concert, and it wasn't too bad. They didn't really seem that 'on.' I think it was a tough crowd, really. They were playing for the grand-opening of the Maryland Science Center -- so the crowd was a mix of parents and their young kids AND those of us die-hard fans. I know TMBG has recently been making children's albums, which is great, but I also think that made it tough for them to please both types of audience members.

But it was free, so whatever.

Sunday was new furniture day. We just got a new dining room set, but it was over at JC Penney. There was no way it would fit into my Saturn (not that I'm ripping on Saturn's trunk space -- hell, we've fit a fold-up mattress into that tiny two-door before!), so I borrowed my boss' truck. She offered it to me when she heard me calling up truck rental places at work -- and my favorite part of the conversation where she offered it to me was when she said, "It's an older truck, but still good, except for its odd habit of randomly stalling out when you're going 50 and slowing down to take a curve." Hmmm.

Yet still, it's better than shelling out $$ for a Budget truck we'd only be using for a 15 minute trip. So I braved the old stalling manual truck, and it did just fine.

I drove the truck to JC Penney, and the wife and my friends followed in the Saturn. My mom had warned me that the dining room set was going to be large and heavy (it was a house-warming gift from the parents, who rock). She said that one part of it was supposed to weigh around 150lbs. Rrrrrright, I said. How could anyone make a dining room table weigh that much unless it was marble or concrete?

She wanted us to get someone to help move it in to the apartment because it would be so heavy. But we had four women on the job, so I wasn't worried. And we're all tough. I may look skinny, but I'm a regular muscle machine.

Please stop laughing.

We arrive at JC Penney, and they start rolling out all the boxes. They just keep coming, and the last one is gigantic. Even the JC Penney warehouse loading guy is having to drag it with all his might. Still, I wasn't scared. I merely walked around like I was a bodybuilder, asking if anyone knew where the weight room was.

I kid.

Anywho, the loading guys get the jumbo set loaded into the truck and Saturn, and we head back to the apartment.

We got all the chairs and the sideboard into the apartment fine. They weren't heavy, just awkward (like me).

As for the remaining box,I can admit it, my mom was right. The table-top weighed 1 million pounds. We had to take it out of the box to be able to navigate it.

But we did it. That's right. Uh huh. My arms are still sore, but we wrangled that thing down from the parking lot, down the stairs to my building, back up the stairs into my building, and into the apartment. High-fives were exchanged. So were oxygen tanks. But whatever, we did it.

And boy, is it beautiful. The new set makes the rest of our furniture look trashy! I think every other piece of furniture we own is from a thrift store. But, we gave the table its big debut on Monday night with a nice little dinner party. Way cool.

We came, they loaded, we conquered. And then we dined.

On Memorial Day, we headed to to the National Zoo in DC. I love how all the Smithsonian museums are free, so then you feel like you don't have to cram everything in to get your money's worth. And for that reason, I've been to the National Zoo several times, sometimes just to watch the prairie dogs.

The zoo was great. Unfortunately, they had no prairie dogs on display, but we saw all kinds of other fun critters, like an alligator, a baby elephant, some big fat hippos, a giraffe, creepy snakes, some monkeys (even though I hate monkeys), a tiger, and many other things I can't pronounce or spell that live in Africa or Asia.

This weekend I'm off to Athens, Ohio, again. It's part business, part fun. Hopefully I'll come back with some good stories.