IKEA!

The thing about living in the buckle of the Bible Belt is that everyone goes to church on Sunday mornings and leaves the interstates and stores to us heathens. No traffic or crowds is heaven for me, especially since I consider shopping at IKEA a rather hellish experience. All that cheery yellow and blue is just a facade to lull you into a sense of security before you get marched all over two stories worth of stuff, hoping not to get trampled by the families who all seem to come equipped with 10 children under the age of two. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Then there's the weird policy of how you can't take the carts out into the parking lot and somehow, you have to drive your car to the side of the building to pick up your stuff after you buy it. The ideal situation is that you bring someone and then one person waits with the stuff while the other brings the car around. As I said to a friend this morning, IKEA is so not Noah's Ark; shoppers don't always come two by two.

Because I got to IKEA before all the mega-churches in the area let out, I was able to grab a spot right near the front of the building, near the unloading dock. That way I figured I'd be able to cart my boxes -- a coffee table, a lamp, and a couple of others things -- to my car without worrying about leaving the stuff unattended. Inside, it was an absolute joy to walk around because I was pretty much one of the only people in the store. I still was mildly annoyed by the fact you have to wander the upstairs football field sized floor before they'll let you go downstairs, which is not only where you can pick up all your flat boxes, but also where all the cool, useless, cheap deco stuff is. I mean, who wouldn't love a series of frosted glass vases that have no purpose at all but to just fit together?

The good thing about today's purchases is that they were for my brother, so I don't have to assemble a darn thing for myself. I did splurge on a cactus garden thingy because I've wanted a centerpiece for my dining room table for a while now and my local grocery store falls short with the fresh flowers. My other plants -- on a side table in the dining room -- are doing very well and so I felt very emboldened to buy more. Wish me luck. For those of you who think cacti are hard to kill, well, you've never met my black thumb.