  Worn out Saturday I spent the day wrestling with a loft bed in Kate's room. I made a hellish trip to IKEA, which turned out to be in the midst of some gigantic sale. The place was a zoo, with kids running amok all over the place, and mall-walking zombies standing or shuffling in the middle of every conceivable walking space. I can spend hours strolling IKEA getting ideas for projects on the right day, but Saturday was not that day.
I curse every one of those urlLink shambling mounds who thought it was a good idea to wander the crowded aisles aimlessly with their ill-mannered offspring. After getting off to that great start, I then spent the afternoon struggling to move a couple of 100 pound packages from the car to Kate's upstairs room alone. I ended up doing it in stages which had me dragging the boxes from the car to the porch, then breaking each package into its component parts on the porch and moving the pieces inside and upstairs. It was quite a work out! Spent about 3 hours sweating and wrestling with pieces of loft bed, then cleaned up and ran off to join folks at Ray and Christine's for a barbecue.
Ray mixed up some excellent urlLink mojitos using this gigantic bunch of fresh mint I'd picked up from the Columbia City farmer's market last week. Yummy! Christine cooked up some great burgers, grilled asparagus, grilled corn on the cob (one of my favorites! ), garnished the whole thing with two different kinds of potato salad, and opened up several bottles of wine.
Very nice way to spend a Kate-free weekend and kick off the official "summer season. " Of course, I hit the wall as I often do at R&C's and had to excuse myself for a lie-down at midnight or so, in the middle of watching the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 urlLink Angels Revenge episode. I told Chris to wake me when he was ready to go, but as it turned out, I woke up on my own around 2:30am. Chris, Ray and the esteemed urlLink Mr. Tynes were having a vigorous discussion about game properties and game design.
Managed to crawl wearily into the car sometime around 3:30am and drove home only to find myself completely awake and alert after the brisk drive in the cool morning. I tinkered on the loft bed for a short while, then noodled around on the internet until I finally felt sleepy again, somewhere around 4:45am. Unfortunately for me, I'd forgotten to set my clock. I have a great alarm clock that I can set to automatically turn off on the weekends, and start ringing again automatically during the week.
This is a fantastic feature, until you have a long weekend where you stay up until almost 5am on a Monday morning. Argh! Was jolted unpleasantly awake at my usual 7:45am, then fell exhaustedly back to sleep only to be rudely awoken again by a recorded message from Citibank somewhere around 8:30am. It was not long after that I just gave up, got out of bed, and went back to finishing the loft bed.
I'm quite proud of my handiwork. I managed to get the bed erected, move Kate's computer desk and associated electronics across the room, get everything working, move and restock her bookshelves, and generally make the room livable again as a solo project. The unfortunate part was that I had to drive to Canby and back to pick Kate up from my mom's after all of this! Chris came with me to keep me company and help make sure I didn't get drowsy on the road (which, thanks to his engaging conversation, I did not). After picking Kate up at my mom's, I tooled around Canby with the family, goggling at the massive development that's sprung up on "the other side of town" near my old junior high.
What I remember as farm fields has turned solidly into suburbia. I took the opportunity to drive by urlLink the "new" elementary school and gave my pal JD a call, figuring we'd pay him a quick visit since he was laid up on the couch after knee surgery. We stormed his house in the middle of dinner, while he and wife Kris were already entertaining the Gingeriches. Kate played with the Gingerich kids while JD gamely hobbled up onto his crutches and gave us a tour of the house, specifically his game closet and library. We couldn't stay too long, as I had a 3+ hour drive ahead of me, but still it was great to see JD in person after having spent the last 15 years or so in touch only through mutual friends, or recently, through e-mail and weblogs. Made it home safe and sound, but am still feeling the effects of my sleepless weekend. 
