There’s no place like home…

17 Jun

Home alone on a Sunday evening, I’ve found myself some time to write out a lengthy entry on here. Aside from the work BS, things the last few weeks have been going really well personally. S and I have been spending some time on organizing our place. It started when I expressed in interest in sitting out on the balcony to read and to veg out. S, being the caring girlfriend that she is, suggested we go to Home Depot and buy ourselves some flowers and such and maybe a lounger. Off we went and we purchased a cedar tree and a plant and the items we would need to plant them. We had a look at some loungers, but I wasn’t sure they’d fit properly on the balcony, so we held off on buying any that day. We came home and did our best to tidy up the balcony; S was quite enthusiastic with the squeeging of the windows. She was very cute, shuttering around with her hair falling onto her face, squeeging one window pane and then moving over to the next. Once everything was cleaned, we potted our plants and placed them in their new places.

The weekend following the Home Depot visit, we were off to IKEA, we were on the hunt for some bookshelves and some new furniture for the balcony. As we made our way through the store, S picked out quite a few items she thought we could benefit from. Unfortunately, we kept walking by people with some serious B.O issues. Honestly, who leaves the house when they smell of sweat like that? We preserved and ventured down to the self-service areas to pick up the boxes of bookcases and shelving. As is always our luck, the shelf we wanted to have for the bedroom was completely sold out and would not be back in stock for another three weeks. In addition to that, one of the bookcases was also out of stock. Alas, we went over to the register with our one bookcase and its glass doors and a dozen or so other items for the house.

We spent last Sunday putting the aforementioned bookcase together. S kept joking about getting IKEA furniture rage, but things went pretty smoothly –at first, anyway. The bookcase itself was pretty easy to put together, not much to fuss over. The glass doors that we bought along with it though, were a completely different story. The instructions weren’t overly clear where to place the hinges and when I was screwing the hinges on the doors, the markings were hard to find and even harder to work with. While putting the doors on the bookcase, S’s furniture rage kicked in. We were having trouble keeping all of the hinges in place while we tightened the screws on them. And then, our biggest worry was coming true-the weight of the doors was pulling the bookcase forward. We hadn’t even placed any of the items in the bookcase, but we knew that if we had, it would tip forward. By this point, S’s rage was in full force; she really didn’t want to anchor the bookcase to the wall so as to avoid puncturing the walls with holes. But really, not anchoring the unit would just mean we would come home to a squished puppy.

Since we didn’t have a ladder, S climbed onto an older bookcase and took on the task of anchoring the bookcase to the wall. In the midst of this, the screw driver head she was using flung off the driver and landed behind the bookcase. This threw S into a deeper rage as she had to climb down and help me move the unit in order to retrieve the screw driver piece. We had some difficulty getting the bookcase back firmly against the wall. At that point, S declared while walking away, “I’m going to stand over here because right now, I just want to break stuff.” As is always the case with S’s rage, I feared for my life and so I kept quiet (heehee). After a few minutes, S came back to where I was standing and we managed to get the unit back in place. S climbed back onto the bookcase and asked told me to be sure to hold the bookcase firmly against the wall. I was quite nervous by then, not only was I worried about S’s rage, but I was worried that the bookcase she was standing on would give and she (and I, who was standing right behind her) would be seriously injured. Thankfully, after a lot of sweat and swearing (on S’s part, I was too scared to speak-lol), the bookcase was tightly anchored to the wall.

While S took a cigarette break, I brought one of the old bookcases down to S’s car since she’d be driving it to her parents’. I got the bookcase into the car with ease, but my mind was so scattered that I closed the trunk door not realizing until it was too late that S’s keys were still inside the trunk. I felt all of the colour drain from me as I thought about heading upstairs and telling S that I had just locked her keys in the car. While I was in the parking lot, there was a guy who parks next to S there and who was kind enough to let me back into the building.

That elevator ride was probably the shortest one of my life. I kept replaying the scenarios of S’s reaction in my head. No matter how I said it, I was certain that I was bound for couch city for an indeterminable amount of time. (I know I wouldn’t be too happy if someone locked my keys in a car haha.) I walked in and nervously placed my hands on the kitchen counter, steadying myself to utter the words, “um, do you happen to have a spare set of keys to the car?” S must have seen how upset I was because she didn’t yell, in fact, she barely flinched. We spent the next ten minutes or so trying to figure out how to get keys out of the trunk. The closest spare key was out in the ‘burbs with P. S called P and caught her just as she was leaving for the airport. P placed the spare car key in her mailbox for us; we just had to figure out how we would go get it. Would we rent a car and drive out there? Would we take the GO train? I volunteered to go then and there to pick it up. But S insisted that I stay, that there was no point in me having dinner so late because of the key. It was decided I would go the next day after work on the GO train and pick up the key.

It took some convincing to get S not to come along, but I explained to her that it didn’t make sense for both of us to pay for a train fare just to pick up the key. It especially didn’t make sense for me to wait around for her after work to catch a train (since I get off of work an hour before she does) I could easily catch an earlier train out if I went on my own. So that’s what I did, after work on Monday, I rushed down to Union Station and got my butt on the first train out to the ‘burbs. Upon arriving at my destination, I sped-walked to P’s place and climbed the steps to reach the mailbox. I reached in and dragged my hand along the bottom of the box only to find there was no key. I began to go into a rage myself; it was a hot, humid day, I was sweating from having walked so quickly, I was hungry and the key that was supposed to be in the mailbox was gone. I called S’s cell; “there’s no key!” I said.

“What?!” She asked, “Are you sure?” S then asked if there was any mail, I said there wasn’t and she said, “Maybe one of the neighbours’ is picking up the mail for P this week and took the key.”

To which I replied, “how am I supposed to know which neighbour has done that?!” S then said she would call P and find out. A few minutes later, my phone rang, it was S telling me to call P directly to find out which neighbour to call on. I called P and she indicated which house I should go to.

“I don’t like leaving keys in mailboxes, dear,” the neighbour told me as she handed me the spare key.

“Thanks,” I said, as I took the key from her and sped back to the train station. I sent S a message while on my way and let her know I had the key. “Thank God!” she wrote back. Sitting on that train, waiting for it to bring me home, I knew what Frodo went through.

I didn’t get home until close to 8 that night, I was so hungry I could barely think. S’s cousin was over and they were going over different design ideas for the condo. They could have been talking about selling children on the black market I was paying very little attention; my sole focus was on getting myself fed. After I had some dinner, I took the spare key and headed down to the parking lot. Just as I had expected, S’s keys were tucked under the bookcase where I had dropped them the day before.

The moral to all of this blabbering? Don’t lock your keys in your car! (Or at least have your spare key somewhere closer to home.) The real point to all of this rambling is that even though it’s been frustrating at times and there’s been a lot of sweat and hard work involved, it’s been an amazing feeling to do these things for the condo together. S and I are working on our home together, collaborating on our lives together. It’s an incredible feeling for me to come home and see our new bookcase put up, our new balcony furniture all in place and S and the gal pal sharing in it with me. This is home, my home, our home.