bookmark_borderThe End of an Era

There are some things in life you can count on. From people to events to sayings. You know, like “when donkeys fly!” means it’ll never happen. But then someone goes and develops a hybrid between a donkey and a condor and there goes old reliable.

Here at my house, whenever we lose something, we say “It’s somewhere safe with the radio.” This is because years ago, I think in ’04, I had a handheld ham radio (Icom T2H). I used it in the truck and brought it back into the house to reprogram. That’s the last I saw of it. I knew I had put it somewhere safe (as in out of dog reach) but that’s it.

Well, if you haven’t figured it out, we found the radio today.

Yesterday we had an adventure. We went to Ikea. On a Saturday. On a holiday weekend. It was…crowded. That’s the politest I can come up with. We went because Friday was payday for both of us and we desperately needed a new pad. Way back in ’91, we bought a bed from Ikea (getting it into the elevator and up to the top floor of the apartment building is another story of its own. we still laugh. and wince.). We lovelovelove this bed. The Swedish style of bed is to have a frame, a platform, a base mattress, and a pad on top that. Some beds now don’t have the base mattress but I’m not that young to find it interesting. The base is original and in decent shape, although today we noticed it was losing some seams. The pad is also original although Lorna says we took it back at one point due to somethinganother but even if we did, it would only have been a year difference. So you can imagine it has lost a lot of its fluff. And its glamor has long since disappeared. We washed it once. Spread it out between several saw horses, soaked it with a hose, sprayed it with a furniture cleaner, then rinsed the crap out of it. It took several days to dry.

But I digress.

We went to Ikea to get another pad. We looked online and found they had muchly improved on the concept. Memory foam! While we were there, we got new pillows and new body pillows. If you have ever gotten anything from Ikea, you know they like to shrink anything into as small a unit as possible. So a desk will come in 52 boxes. Seriously. Our mattress is rolled and tightly placed inside a tough plastic bag. We do not look forward to popping the seal. We got home very late and decided to deal with it today.

We are in the process of taking everything off, tightening all the allen bolts (there’s a ton of ’em), and cleaning the bed. Okay, Lorna’s in there doing the cleaning part while I “rest up”.

I digressed again.

Under the bed was this rolling plastic box Lorna uses for storage. Inside is a stack of newspapers we are collecting for the kids. Day they were born, big events, etc. I vacuumed off the top of the box (how the hell does does get there?!?) and, for giggles, opened it. Inside, just laying there, was the radio. Lorna has no clue how it got there. So she says. I’ve never seen the box other than the day we got it. Inside is the newspapers on one end and the radio, a small paper Ace Hardware bag, and some scraps of paper.

So now we wonder, as we marvel at the places and amounts of dust and dog hair that can accumulate under beds, where then are all the other things we have lost that were supposedly with the radio?