Suburban Life

I don't know why we decided to remodel the kitchen while we both recovering from joint replacement surgery. It was my wife's idea, but I went along with it. I mean it sounds insane, but do you want to be inconvenienced by three separate disasters, each of which is going to consume two months of your time, or do you schedule them all for the same time and so get all your suffering compressed into two months of extra-strength suffering? We are both getting around pretty good, I would not be afraid of trying to walk from the parking lot all the way to the back of Home Depot, something I wouldn't even consider before my surgery. I was in pretty bad shape then.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, I will get to it, I hope. So after months of planning and discussion, the actual hammer-hits-the-nail remodeling will begin in a week. We wanted to clear out all the furniture from the upper two floors. We did this for two reasons, one it gets the stuff out of the way of the mechanics who are going to be doing the work, and we don't have to worry about it being damaged while the remodeling operation is going on. (Damage I can live with, it's the endless recriminations that I don't want).

So when you empty two floors of your house, where do you put all the furniture and stuff? Do not underestimate the amount of stuff. We've been here 30 years, more or less, and boy oh boy, do we have stuff.

What we did is we hired a moving company to shift the furniture in the house. All the stuff on the main floor goes to the basement, all the stuff in the top floor goes to the main floor. The upstairs remodel isn't externsive, paint and carpet mostly if I recall. It should be done in a week. Then the stuff on the main floor can be moved back to the top floor, leaving the main floor clear for the remodel.

So the movers came today and shift everything down one floor and now the basement is cosy, to put it mildly.

Since the last surgery I have been sitting in an office chair to watch TV. It's not nearly as comfortable as the recliner I usually use, but I was trying to be a good boy and follow the doc's instructions and don't bend my hips more than 90 degrees and getting out of a recliner usually means going into a crouch when you rock forward to get out of the chair.

How-so-some-ever, when the boys shifted the furniture, the office chair I had been using to watch TV got shuffled off somewhere (who knows? how did we get so much stuff?) so when I went to look at the TV in its new location and contemplate having to connect all the cables, I bethinks to have a seat while I mutilate on this job and I plop down into the recliner. When I realize what I have done I immediately think 'bad boy' followed instantly by 'this seat is pretty damn comfortable'. Later on I found myself at my desk with no memory of how I got here. Blame that on not getting any sleep last night.

Anyway, while I was reclining I also thought about how one could get out of this chair without bending more than 90 degrees. You might be able to do it by just getting up in the normal manner, I should try it. The other way I thought of would be to slide to the floor and then roll onto your hands and knees, crawl across the floor until you reach something you can use to pull yourself up. I have used that method before I had surgery. That hip wasn't good for much.