Holiday fun and games with Josh and Lauren

Having nothing better to do and being absolutely nuts, the lovely Miss Wendy and I started the new year off with a visit to IKEA Sunday morning, waiting at the door – along with one homeless guy – when the home furnishing store opened for business.

While the rest of the folks in the Land of Cotton were sleeping in after a night of celebrating, Wendy and I were on a mission. A day earlier – that would be Saturday – we decided to dive into the 21st century and bought a ginormous flat screen TV. Now we were in search of something smart, chic and relatively cheap to rest it on in style.

After a short detour for breakfast – scrambled eggs, a beefy bit of treif, home fries and a biscuit; all for 99 cents – we wandered through the vast warehouse, spinning about Scandinavian creations that were sleek, modern and just about perfect – if you happen to be moving into a dorm!

That said, once we managed to stumble into the right corner of the furniture palace, the room filled with cabinets, bookshelves, media centers and TV stands was calling our name – hello! Just a few days earlier and we’d probably have been jostling our way through a packed house of holiday shoppers. Early Sunday morning all we needed to do is step around the one homeless guy we’d beaten to the front door to capture our prize.

We played out the IKEA shuffle – writing down the product number, aisle and bin numbers for the cabinet we coveted – then began the 20 minute hike to the basement where most everything is warehoused.

An hour later we were back home, an 80-pound box of stuff – boards, screws, hinges, knobs – and a 15-page manual featuring absolutely no text, a few stick figures and a bunch of indecipherable diagrams that, I was assured by the officials at IKEA, was all I needed to whip together my wondrous new TV cabinet. Right!

Did I mention that when God was handing out the DIY genes, I was still standing in the line for good looks! Fortunately, my wonderful and talented daughter Lauren came to the rescue. Knowing this moment would arrive one day, she had the very good sense several years ago to marry Josh.

Now Josh is a handsome and gifted man who knows his way around a screwdriver. So it was only, ah, three hours after studying the manual; sending the lovely Miss Wendy and Lauren out for a walk; my coaching earnestly from the sidelines; Josh doing a little fancy footwork and some jury rigging that the work was done and we all agreed that it was good – and yet it was still evening of the first day; still time enough to unpack the ginormous tube and set it right.

That little project – a simple matter, the manufacturer says, of fitting on a stand, plugging in a few wires and programming some software – wiped out another hour and the sun had long since called it quits and dipped below the horizon.

Truth to tell, if Josh hadn’t come to my rescue, the ginormous TV would be gathering dust in a corner for the next several months and the IKEA cabinet would now be kindling. The good news is after a celebratory meal at one of Lauren and Josh’s favorite restaurants, I made it home just in time for, wait for it, Sunday Night Football – Giants, Cowboys and one whopping big television. It turns out – at least in the case of TVs – that size really does make a difference.

All of that is a long and windy way to say thanks Josh. Now if you can put down your screwdriver – or, ah, maybe pick it up – and start working on that other little project with Lauren, maybe 2012 will be a really special year for all of us ... I'm just saying ...