Day’s Verse:
Turning his head, Peter noticed the disciple Jesus loved following right behind. When Peter noticed him, he asked Jesus, “Master, what’s going to happen to him?”
Jesus said, “If I want him to live until I come again, what’s that to you? You—follow me.”
John 21:2-22 (context)

…Yet Ian and I spent most of Saturday shopping. We started by laying on a bunch of different mattresses; then we moved on to poking buttons and twisting knobs on different washer/dryer sets; then we proceeded to pantomime vacuuming with various vacuum; and we finished off the set by sitting on a variety of extraordinarily expensive stools. During this interlude, we learned the following:

• Mattresses aren’t named the same thing store to store. If I like the Sealy SuperSoft Downy Cloud at Sears and ask at Sleep Country USA to try a Sealy SuperSoft Downy Cloud, they’ll tell me that sorry, they don’t call it the same thing, and could I please describe the mattress specs? Eventually we might establish that Sleep Country USA calls what is most likely the same mattress the Sealy Bellingham. This makes comparison shopping for mattresses a nightmare, and is, I think, thoroughly evil.
• You can pay over $2,000 for a washer, and just under $2,000 for a matching dryer.
• It matters where the water and drain hookup are in your laundry room. Ours, it turns out, are on the non-standard right side, and most washers are built with doors that open to be handy for left-side situation. In short, we can’t buy any old washer/dryer and flip flop which side they go on in the room because of where the doors open.
• You can also pay $550 per stool for custom-made stools. Ian and I agreed that, although we’d like sturdy, quality stools, $550 a pop is above and beyond.

On Saturday we did successfully order a mattress, and we purchased the coolest vacuum cleaner I’ve ever seen (check out picture 3 in the gallery to see why I feel that way). We still have to do some stuff on the washer and dryer: Find somebody to run a gas line to the laundry room, which only has electricity right now, and have that done; find out if we can run a long drainage hose to the washer; pick a washer/dryer model that works with our laundry room; and actually buy one.

On top of that, we still have to find bookcases, dining room chairs, and a bunch of other furniture to make the house comfortably livable. Next weekend Ian drives down to Oregon with his dad to retrieve some free furniture they’re giving us, and after that, we’ll have enough to actually start living there.

In the meantime, we have spent much of this cold, rainy Memorial Day weekend moving boxes out of my parents’ house — we’re down to only a couple very large things on the back porch and the things we use on a daily basis — sorting boxes and trying to find homes for as many things as we can without having any real furniture. The kitchen is almost all set up, we’ve got big plans for a library room, and general idea of the family room. And, as a side note, Ian did his first-ever home repair project, fixing our garage door openers (which lived up to their name and only opened, but never closed, the doors).

And, totally unrelated, I successfully put a rack on the freebie bike that used to be my rental bike from March through April. I’m very happy that a rack I already had fit on the bike with no special jimmying or help from bike shop people (they did supply me with 4 bolts for free. Thank you, Kirkland Bike Shop.).