The Tablympics

As I mentioned earlier, it's spring break. And unfortunately, both K. and I had too much work to do to undertake a major project in the house. Today I faced a large stack of grading to do and a colloquium I am giving at a nearby college to write and some midsemester evaluations to write, not to mention the fact that I really really wanted to finish and send out the preprint that I have been working on. And K's To-Do list is no shorter than mine. So what did we spend the day doing? Lots of minor projects around the house. For K, this mainly involved working in the garden, and I'm sure she will post photos and descriptions of all of her work later. For the first part of the day, I also worked outside, cleaning out our shed (doing some prep work for a future Revivalizing Project which we will disclose at a later date) and finally throwing out the last of the boxes that have already been unpacked from the move - yes, many of those have been sitting in our shed all winter, doyougotaproblemwithdat?

After lunch, I came inside and started the main projects of the afternoon -- putting together the many tables that K. bought during her IKEAdventures the other day. Yes, dear readers, our long national nightmare is over as we finally bought bedside tables after many moons of looking. We did in fact go for the tables that K. suggested in that earlier post, the Tovik bedside tables. And I have to say that K. has great taste, and that they match the bed I built a little too well, and now I think people will assume we bought the bed at IKEA as well:





Sure, they look quite IKEA-y, but I finally have a real bedside table, and I am very excited about that. Also at IKEA, K. picked up a couple of side tables for the den. And because I had so many more important things to be doing today, I decided that building four tables was better than just building two and I proceeded to put together the Leksvik sidetables that she had picked up to match the previously purchased entertainment unit. And now our den is a little closer to being fully furnished:








Astute readers will notice something else about that last picture -- yes, after 8 months of living in our house we finally got the nerve up to actually hang some art. It was scary and emotionally trying to put holes in the walls that we poured our blood, sweat, and spackle into, but I got up the nerve to do it, and hung three prints, newly framed in some frames that (all together now) K. bought at IKEA. When we got married, my dad gave us a collection of prints of the posters from all of the Summer Olympics that he had gotten during the Atlanta games. For the last five years we have looked for frames but never found ones that worked because they are somewhat awkwardly shaped. But IKEA's fetish for the metric system came to the rescue once again, and we were able to pick up a few frames that pretty much are the right size. And now we have hanging in our den the official posters of the first Athens games, the first Stockholm games, and the oh-so-hip Mexico City 1968 poster. Next time we go to IKEA we will pick up a few more and cover more of the modern era, though we have a family dispute about whether we would actually want to display Robert Rauschenberg's poster from the Los Angeles games, which features the cutting edge and hightech picture of calculators.

Newly emboldened by hanging that art, I moved to my office where I hung a few things including my diploma (because unlike Doctors, mathematicians are not required to display their credentials in their place of business) before calling it a day: