Inside Outside Upside Down

The problem with suddenly acquiring a tv after several years without one is that they take up space... a lot of space. You need an expanse of wall to put it against so kids don't get into the wires. A shelf or table of some sort to set it on; wall mounting is a practical alternative, but not allowed in an apartment. Cables running to the antenna, which wants to be near a window. And people want to be able to sit down while they watch it... which means rearranging everything.

Our apartment is set up kind of funny: there is a smallish kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a room shaped rather like that piece from Tetris that looks like a rectangle made of six squares that's missing one of the corner squares. Does that make sense? This is our dining room--office--living room: table and chairs, couches, desk, bookshelves... and now, apparently, a tv.

Yesterday morning, Matt and Little Bear adventured through a couple of second-hand shops and furniture stores on their quest for a tv-bearing shelf, and came home with a little two-shelf bookcase roughly as broad as the new tv. I took advantage of Little Bear's absence to get as much stuff as possible cleared off of the desk and bookshelf already in the room, and move small, light-weight furniture down the hall out of the way.

When they got home, Little Bear took off with the screwdriver while Matt was attaching the stand to the tv, and had great fun evading me while running around the room "fixing" things.

My costochondritis is a lot better than it was: I'm down to one megadose of ibuprofen a day instead of three, and the days I've forgotten to take it haven't been horrible, so I am optimistic that it'll all be over soon. Moving heavy furniture around sounded like a good way to bring the problem back full force, though, so we were so grateful that my dad and sister came by to give Matt a hand! The three of them got pretty much everything rearranged nicely; we are still puzzling over what to do with our sack chair, because we've run out of corners and it's ridiculously large when not squished between walls and other furniture--that was definitely a college-student-mentality purchase, not an adult one, but it was a fun thing to have as the first piece of furniture we bought together.

I wish I could say that everything is all neatly organized again now--they moved the furniture early yesterday afternoon!--but Little Bear has been giving us the predictable but frustrating toddler overreaction to change, and the table still has a jumble of bric-à-brac that needs to find news homes on the desk and bookshelf... or maybe at someone else's house. I'm really enjoying the sparse, clear aesthetic of flat surfaces with nothing on them. We will see. (As though that could ever last in a house with kids! I'm not completely delusional, I promise.)

It's very nice to have everything becoming orderly again, though, and I think we will like this new arrangement. Matt worked with the antenna this morning, and we can now receive all five channels broadcast locally! Which is five more than we will watch very often, but we were glad that the static cut out in time to see Shaun White locking up his Olympic halfpipe spot!