House Construction & Destruction

First, an informative story about big knives and watermelons. Last night, Evelin asked me to halve the watermelon I bought at the farmers market on Sunday. No big deal. I place the watermelon (a cute little Sugar Baby) on the cutting board on the counter and pick up a big, not-as-sharp-as-it-should-be knife from the drying rack. It's at this point that I decide to get cute, swinging the knife high and smashing through the ceiling.

The watermelon (and more importantly Evelin) were not hurt by this, but I did get a nice bruise on my thumb that's still a bit sore and one of the plastic panels that makes up the kitchen ceiling shattered.

(The kitchen has a dropped ceiling that consists of a grid of plastic panels. Above them are fluorescent lights. When the lights are on, it makes the whole ceiling glow in a way that Evelin hates, so she's not so mad about the damage to the house -- actually she laughed a lot -- but we have no idea where to find a replacement panel.)

After cleaning things up a bit, the watermelon was cut with much less flourish. And I realize I should not be allowed to play with knives. Plus I am sure to set many bad examples for the child over the coming decades.

So that's the destruction part of the evening. The construction part involves the green room, the finishing touch for which is the curtains. On Monday night, Evelin and I ran out to Linens-n-Things to look for drapery stuff. She gravitated pretty quickly to the Umbra Scroll rods, which were more expensive that I wanted to go with, but Evelin won out saying we could spend more on the rods and less on the curtains.

Since we were out in College Park, we stopped into Ikea in search of cheap curtain options. Evelin fell in love with the Alvine Bi curtains. Of course College Park was out of them, but we figured we'd be passing Ikeas in Baltimore and Elizabeth, New Jersey, when driving up to visit relatives at some point during the summer, so we could look for them later.

[ASIDE: Thinking of all things Ikea, a while back Margaret Marks of Transblawg provided a rundown of how Ikea comes up with its product names, and, even longer ago, Néablog linked to the Ikea Furniture Test. Sadly the link seems to be dead, so I can't bumble my way through the Swedish to see if I'm a Billy bookcase or a Granås chair or a Strömling dish drainer ... ]

Instead of waiting for a long drive, it looked like a slow day at work yesterday, so I decided to see if I could speed down to Potomac Mills during my lunch hour. It turns out they had the Alvine Bi curtains, and I was able to make it there and back in about 75 minutes.

So, after dismantling the watermelon and kitchen ceiling, I hung the curtains. Now we just have to decide upon something to hide the television in that room in and it'll be pretty much finished. And then there's the small matter of still needing a crib ...