The Swedish are Coming! The Swedish are Coming! ...and This Time They're Bringing Furniture!

IKEA the Mecca of all furnishings Scandinavian, stylish, and affordable is finally opening a store in the Buckeye State, the home of over 80 colleges and universities. That’s a lot of college kids who could use some IKEA goodness to brighten up institutional style dorm rooms or bland off campus housing.

According to Ikean blog ,each IKEA store is unique in it’s own way and that goes for that store’s grand opening events. When IKEA opens a new store, Opening Day is a serious EVENT. As in take-a-couple-of-days-off-work-to-camp-out-in-front-of-the-store-to-be-first- in-line type of event. If you have the time and dedication to camp out in front of the store, the good folks at IKEA will make it well worth your while.

Here’s what I know is in store for shoppers when the IKEA West Chester, Ohio throws open their doors for the first time at 10:00 AM on March 12, 2008:

- An opening ceremony that starts with a flag raising and the IKEA company tradition of sawing a log in half to bring good luck.
- A confirmed drawing giving away $1,000 IKEA gift cards. Fill out the form on the IKEA West Chester microsite, print it out, and drop the completed form in the designated contest drop box at IKEA West Chester between 3/12/08 and 3/20/08. The lovely folk at IKEA will randomly draw Ten (10) winners from the entries received on 3/21/08. Each person will each win a $1,000 IKEA Gift Card.

- Rumor has it that the first 100 customers in the store will get a free Poäng Chair - that’s a free $90 chair just walking in the door people!

How to Measure Snow

Several schools closed this morning because of the snow that fell last night. Looking out my window, it doesn’t look like we got enough snow to close down the city and incite panic. So, how much snow did we really get last night? I could measure the snowfall using the conventional Stick-a-Ruler-in-the-Snow Method. It's easy and accurate. And boring. So, I decided to measure the snowfall using the Blitzkrieg Method. It's just as easy as the Ruler Method, yet not as accurate. However, the Blitzkrieg Method is much, much more fun!

How do you use the Blitzkrieg Method to measure snow? Like this:

I consider using my dog Blitzkrieg as a ruler, multitasking & effective time management. He gets a chance to romp in the snow and take a potty break while I get to see how much snowfall is on the ground, get a chance to romp in the snow, and decline taking an outside potty break.

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Craft or Crap?

I have some very clever and crafty people in my family. For example, both of my grandmothers crochet. Both made me endless varieties of scarves, afghans (the blankety thing, not the dog), and the like. Some were very pretty and a delight to wear. Others as I look back on it were something that even the most devoted grandchild (that’s me) wouldn’t wear unless she was forced to by her mother. (And I have the scars to prove it.)

Where in the world, my young self wondered did my loving Grandmother get the idea for the weird thing she made me and that I now feel conflicted about being seen in public with it? Now I know.

What Not to Crochet is a vital public service that warns the world of the dangers of bad crochet projects that are currently available from crochet magazines, crochet pattern, and yarn distributors. Currently available?! YIKES! Run! Save your selves! Bad design ahead!
Thanks to WNTC, they give us gift-receivers-to be humorous warnings about such dangers of craftdom as:

Child Suffocating ponchos

How to Turn Scottish Shortbread into Valentine’s Day Shortbread

I wanted to do something extra nice for Husband on Valentine’s Day. He’s not really a big candy-munching guy. In fact, he still has quite a bit left of his Christmas candy so buying him any variation of the big ol’ heart box full of chocolate didn’t make much sense. However, I still wanted to give some sweets to my sweetie. What to do? I decided to turn him his favorite Scottish Shortbread it into Valentine’s Day Shortbread.

Here’s how I did it. In addition to an oven, you will need:

If I Had a Hammer, I Would Bodge the World

Now that I own a condominium, I realize more and more that homeownership is a mixed bag of:

• The good - finally I can live in a place where the walls can be something other than Ugly Renter Beige.
• The not so good - if something breaks, I have to fix it, or it stays broken forever.

This leads me to today’s favorite tool: the rubber mallet. With a rubber mallet, you can fix pretty much anything in a quick and careless manner*. Well, almost anything. A rubber mallet is not the tool to use when you are trying to break into your own house.

But that's a story for a different day.

Anyhoo, today I pressed the button on the garage door opener. The door made its usual, "Wrrrr, wrrr" noise as it moved down, down and stopped when it hit the driveway with a strange, "ka-chunk!" Whereby the garage door decided it didn't want to stay in its down, upright, and locked position and moved in an upward fashion. Weird.

Because I can be rather thick, I play push-the button-and-hope-the-door-closes about three or four more times before giving up and actually walking into the garage to investigate why the door wouldn’t close. Turns out one of the wheels on the side of the garage door jumped the door track. A couple of whacks with my trusty rubber mallet were all it took to quickly reset the wheel into the garage door track and allow the garage door to close properly. Easy peasy.

I love my rubber mallet.

* AKA "bodging" (for those of you who weren't into Scrapheap Challengeor >Junkyard Wars back in the day.)

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