February 9, 2007

-- This will be the final update of The West Virginia Surf Report. For a while, anyway. I'm taking a vacation from the site next week to focus on other pressing docket items, and maybe re-charge my batteries a bit. Since it's deader than Kelsey's nuts at work, and I have fifty (count 'em!) vacation days in the bank, I'm going to take a full-on breather from the real world. No work, no website, no pants. That'll be next week's theme, my friends.

If I'd thought about it early enough, I would've tried to arrange a guest host. Maybe I could've asked The Angry White Guy to come back for a few days, or something like that? But it's probably too late for that sort of thing now, and I don't have the energy to try to persuade anyone. So screw it. I'll be back on President's Day, or the day after. I'm sure we'll all survive.

In the meantime, here are few items from my Big Notebook of Exploitable Things....

-- In addition to our comedic kitchen adventures, I'm in the midst of a low-grade family room reclamation project. I'm all jacked-up about it because of the BAT; I believe our new television deserves proper surroundings.

Until recently, the family room had been a catch-all for crapola. We have a fold-out couch in there that's fairly new but mighty ugly, and a fully-collapsed loveseat (not sure how that happened) on which a person sinks all the way to the floor and their knees are practically above their head, while sitting.

In the corner was an old chair I bought in California at Cost Plus or Pier One ("Prior One" according to an Atlanta co-worker). It was made in Bangladesh or some shit, and the seat was ripped all to hell. It looked like somebody had farted it apart. Beside that hideousness was an old floor lamp that leaned farther to the left than Dennis Kucinich, complete with a shade that was long ago exploded by a flying Frisbee or Nerf football or somesuch.

In addition to the fine furnishings, I had a metric shitload of DVDs stacked up in the floor, in great dusty towers. Oh, it was a sight to behold. The rest of the house is a regular adult residence, but that one room was like an instant trip back to my first apartment in Greensboro. All that was missing was the beanbag chairs, the water-driven VCR, and the Hustlers.

So I got rid of the Bangladeshi fart-catcher, and its left-leaning companion. And I brought home some boxes from work, and moved 99% of the DVDs to the basement. The only ones I'm keeping up here are TV shows like Seinfeld and Green Acres and Andy Griffith. The rest have now been sucked into the subterranean vortex, never to be heard from again.

Toney and I looked at new floor lamps last weekend, and none flipped our switch. So we went on Amazon and bought one, and it arrived yesterday. In a gigantic box, a box that seems to be whispering to me: "You're going to have to put me together, and it's going to be a surprisingly difficult process. I will make you cry, doughboy, sure as shit."

Also, remember how I told you I recently ventured into a K-Mart store for the first time in years? Well, I saw something in there that intrigued me. It was a piece of furniture (from the Martha Stewart Collection!) called a media tower. Here it is. It's basically a smallish cabinet with a door made of wood and glass, and I figured it would be perfect for storing our in-rotation DVDs. It was pretty cool looking, and also too expensive, I thought.

But the idea lodged itself in my brain somewhere, until it started festering. And when the thing appeared in their Sunday ad last week, for twenty bucks off, I went over there and bought one. It came in a box that weighed somewhere around, and I'm only estimating here, a million pounds. Needless to say, there was nobody to help me with it, and I think I turned a few discs sideways in my spine trying to wrestle it into my car. For the rest of the day I leaned like a lamp.

And now the hundred or so parts that were in that box are spread all over the floor. I started to put it together while watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, got pissed, and abandoned the project. I'm bent on completing it tomorrow, but why does it have to be so confusing?? The directions are a joke, with pictures of parts I don't have, and everything is in tiny, tiny pieces. I'm not sure, but I believe you have to actually put the screws together before you can use them. 

Sweet sainted mother of Phoebe Snow.

Once I get all that crap completed, I think it'll look pretty darn good in there. For the first time ever. I have an old panoramic photograph of my hometown of Dunbar, WV. It was taken in 1927 (I think), and is about four feet wide. I'd love to get that baby framed, and hang it up in the reclaimed family room. But I might be over-reaching a bit with that deal. How much do you think it would cost to have a Prince-sized photo framed, anyway?

And I'm going to keep writing at work, and will tack the rest of today's update to the end of this bitch when I get home tonight. Stay tuned, boys and girls.

In the meantime, tell us about your first apartment, if you're so inclined. What were its remarkable features? Did you have the giant spool for a dining room table, like Jeff Foxworthy likes to talk about? Did anything exciting happen there? Like, say, your brother windmilled a bottle of ketchup in the middle of the living room, and the lid flew off?

Tell us about it, won't you? And I'll be back tonight.

See ya then.

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