I was looking at the Department of Primary Industries' web site to try to find some raw statistical data for some students when I came across this charming picture.
Is it just me, or does the fish look evil?
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Evil Fish
I was looking at the Department of Primary Industries' web site to try to find some raw statistical data for some students when I came across this charming picture.
Is it just me, or does the fish look evil?
Monday, September 24, 2007
Wiv one enormous chair...
(originally emailed on 24/09/2007)
I bought a chair on the weekend, and threw my entire household into chaos.
It wasn’t really intentional. Buying the chair, I mean. I went to Harvey Norman looking for prices on an MP3 player. Didn’t find a player I wanted, but fell in love with a chair.
It was just one arm-chair, not in a suit, sitting by itself in a little corner behind the back of one couch and next to a couple of dining suits. I saw that chair and thought: “I like the look of that chair.” Then, because it’s what I do in furniture stores when I see chairs I like the look of, I sat in it. I thought to myself: “I like the feel of this chair”. Then I put my feet up on one of the dining chairs in front of me so I could see what it would be like with a footstool, and thought to myself: “This is my chair.”
Kind of like Goldilocks, only without wasting time breaking stuff.
There was one thing I didn’t like about the chair, and that was the $500 price tag. I wasn’t keen on that at all. I talked myself out of buying the chair, saying I would probably get it if it was less than $300, but not for $500. However, I kept coming back to sit on the chair, and the charming salesman noticed and offered to knock $65 off the price. In hindsight, that wasn’t really better. $435 is still too much to pay for a chair (and significantly more than my $300 limit), but the chair was calling to me and I was vulnerable.
Where it was, though, I didn’t realise how big it would be. It didn’t register to me at all that something which was the same height as a dining chair would be significantly taller than most lounge chairs...
So, I buy this chair on a whim, and the charming salesman tells me they have five new ones at the warehouse, which will probably be nicer than the display chair which has had every Tom, Dick and Goldilocks sit in it, and I believe him.
Part of me new how dangerous it was. My mother has made it absolutely clear that I am not allowed to bring any new furniture into the house (that may sound weird, but I have a thing for flat-packed anything, so it’s not entirely unwarranted). If I had been thinking, I would have remembered the disruption that was caused by buying a new stereo which was slightly bigger than the old one, and thought better of the chair. However, I wasn’t thinking. I just figured we’d move out one of the dodgy chairs that are on the verge of collapse and put my chair in instead.
Heck, it’s not like I was going to ask them to live with this chair forever. It would be my chair and I would take it with me if ever I managed to get my own place. A nice, functional and reasonably pretty chair like this would fit in almost anywhere, and would be perfect for my current dream decorating scheme (which involves a house full of things that don’t match, and there for fit in by virtue of not matching anything else)…
Strangely, my mother was not as objectionable about the chair as I thought she would be. She’s been uncharacteristically accommodating lately, and I’m starting to get nervous. Anyway, when I got the chair upstairs and out of its wrapper, I discovered a rather important fact about this particular item - it’s huge. Put it next to any other, normal item of lounge room furniture and the chair seems positively gigantic. We couldn’t just replace on of the other chairs with this chair, we had to arrange all of the other furniture so it could sit by itself. That was the only way we could stop it from looking completely ridiculous.
We spent a couple of hours rearranging the furniture in the lounge room, trying every conceivable combination (without moving my grandmother’s chair, which was off limits, and the buffet, which would have disintegrated if we tried). My mother, oddly, kept trying to throw out her own chair in these arrangements.
She has a couch which badly needs replacing, but she isn’t going to replace it until my grandmother dies and they can get rid of the lift that currently takes-up half of the front stairs. Even though she practically lives in this couch, and it would be a long time before it would ever be replaced, she kept suggesting that it should be given to the dogs and she’d just sit on one of the other chairs. I don’t think I could have coped with the guilt of that, but fortunately we managed to come by an arrangement in which the only thing that was removed from the lounge room was my keyboard and its stand.
The kicker is, the new chair isn’t as comfortable as the one in the store, and because it hasn’t been “broken in” yet, it’s actually higher than the one I fell for. So we have this huge chair that required the entire lounge room (and, by extension, my room and other parts of the house) to be rearranged, and it isn’t even as good as I thought it would be. Plus, none of our footstools are tall enough for me to comfortably stretch my legs out in front of me (and buying a knew footstool is not on the agenda).
Oh, well. I have hope that it will be broken in soon, and truly become “my chair”. Plus, you know, it means I always have a place for tall people to sit if they visit me. All I need to do is make sure I also own a chair that’s ridiculously low, and I’m set.
I bought a chair on the weekend, and threw my entire household into chaos.
It wasn’t really intentional. Buying the chair, I mean. I went to Harvey Norman looking for prices on an MP3 player. Didn’t find a player I wanted, but fell in love with a chair.
It was just one arm-chair, not in a suit, sitting by itself in a little corner behind the back of one couch and next to a couple of dining suits. I saw that chair and thought: “I like the look of that chair.” Then, because it’s what I do in furniture stores when I see chairs I like the look of, I sat in it. I thought to myself: “I like the feel of this chair”. Then I put my feet up on one of the dining chairs in front of me so I could see what it would be like with a footstool, and thought to myself: “This is my chair.”
Kind of like Goldilocks, only without wasting time breaking stuff.
There was one thing I didn’t like about the chair, and that was the $500 price tag. I wasn’t keen on that at all. I talked myself out of buying the chair, saying I would probably get it if it was less than $300, but not for $500. However, I kept coming back to sit on the chair, and the charming salesman noticed and offered to knock $65 off the price. In hindsight, that wasn’t really better. $435 is still too much to pay for a chair (and significantly more than my $300 limit), but the chair was calling to me and I was vulnerable.
Where it was, though, I didn’t realise how big it would be. It didn’t register to me at all that something which was the same height as a dining chair would be significantly taller than most lounge chairs...
So, I buy this chair on a whim, and the charming salesman tells me they have five new ones at the warehouse, which will probably be nicer than the display chair which has had every Tom, Dick and Goldilocks sit in it, and I believe him.
Part of me new how dangerous it was. My mother has made it absolutely clear that I am not allowed to bring any new furniture into the house (that may sound weird, but I have a thing for flat-packed anything, so it’s not entirely unwarranted). If I had been thinking, I would have remembered the disruption that was caused by buying a new stereo which was slightly bigger than the old one, and thought better of the chair. However, I wasn’t thinking. I just figured we’d move out one of the dodgy chairs that are on the verge of collapse and put my chair in instead.
Heck, it’s not like I was going to ask them to live with this chair forever. It would be my chair and I would take it with me if ever I managed to get my own place. A nice, functional and reasonably pretty chair like this would fit in almost anywhere, and would be perfect for my current dream decorating scheme (which involves a house full of things that don’t match, and there for fit in by virtue of not matching anything else)…
Strangely, my mother was not as objectionable about the chair as I thought she would be. She’s been uncharacteristically accommodating lately, and I’m starting to get nervous. Anyway, when I got the chair upstairs and out of its wrapper, I discovered a rather important fact about this particular item - it’s huge. Put it next to any other, normal item of lounge room furniture and the chair seems positively gigantic. We couldn’t just replace on of the other chairs with this chair, we had to arrange all of the other furniture so it could sit by itself. That was the only way we could stop it from looking completely ridiculous.
We spent a couple of hours rearranging the furniture in the lounge room, trying every conceivable combination (without moving my grandmother’s chair, which was off limits, and the buffet, which would have disintegrated if we tried). My mother, oddly, kept trying to throw out her own chair in these arrangements.
She has a couch which badly needs replacing, but she isn’t going to replace it until my grandmother dies and they can get rid of the lift that currently takes-up half of the front stairs. Even though she practically lives in this couch, and it would be a long time before it would ever be replaced, she kept suggesting that it should be given to the dogs and she’d just sit on one of the other chairs. I don’t think I could have coped with the guilt of that, but fortunately we managed to come by an arrangement in which the only thing that was removed from the lounge room was my keyboard and its stand.
The kicker is, the new chair isn’t as comfortable as the one in the store, and because it hasn’t been “broken in” yet, it’s actually higher than the one I fell for. So we have this huge chair that required the entire lounge room (and, by extension, my room and other parts of the house) to be rearranged, and it isn’t even as good as I thought it would be. Plus, none of our footstools are tall enough for me to comfortably stretch my legs out in front of me (and buying a knew footstool is not on the agenda).
Oh, well. I have hope that it will be broken in soon, and truly become “my chair”. Plus, you know, it means I always have a place for tall people to sit if they visit me. All I need to do is make sure I also own a chair that’s ridiculously low, and I’m set.
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