the power of words.

I decided to put my table and chairs together tonight. Who wouldn't be excited to do that? I took everything out of the packaging and it looks really nice. But holy cow ... LOTS of parts! When I was little, I spent hours building towers and roller coasters with K'Nex, which often required staring at the picture instructions to figure out what went where. But here's the thing: the pictures were color coded. Each piece was unique in color, size, and/or shape so it wasn't rocket science. Now when you open up a box of table and chair parts, you don't expect it to be hard. In fact, the table only took me a couple of minutes to put together. But now I have these four chairs, a bazillion parts, and black and white instructions with no words.

I did a couple of steps at a time, then repeated them for each chair. I was hitting my final three steps when I realized I had screwed ALL of the back legs onto the chair backs in the wrong direction. Which means I know have 40 screws to take out, then reverse the legs, then rescrew them all back. I'm a bit frustrated to say the least. I'm not touching it tonight. It's going to sit there scattered all over the place until I'm in the mood to remove then replace 40 screws. So if anyone is bored tomorrow evening ... I've got an extra Allen wrench. I'll pay you in gratitude and quality time. And there will probably be a little extra something for you in heaven.

Cheryl got back from her mission trip this week and was in the office today. She brought us all candy! It seemed to be some sort of cookie, but I think you could cover anything in chocolate and sprinkles and make a lot of people happy.

It was cold and cloudy when I left work today. I'm not diggin' this dark-all-the-time shenanigan. It's pretty depressing and makes my evenings feel extra-short.

Cornell is playing UMass right now. I'm listening to the audio. Currently: Cornell 25, UMass 19. A few minutes left in the 1st half. My brother has 8 points.