Plural Post (two part)

It Pays to Watch Where You Walk

Saturday's mean early papers so we were up at 5:30 and walking the routes by 6:15. On my way back down Main Street a caught a glimpse of something shiny just on the edge of the sidewalk. I paused to pick up a dime. Yippee, I thought, usually it's only pennies. This week it's been a quarter and a dime! I continued on. As I got just opposite the entrance road to the "dump", I noticed a small bank envelope on the sidewalk. This I thought I'd better check out. Nothing inside however. Oh well, it would have been fun to go to the police station to report finding hundreds. Walked a bit more and noticed some small brush (branches) that had fallen off a truck on it's way to the dump were infringing on the road. If a little wind picked up they would be a hazard to drivers. Okay, good deed time. I reach over and moved two branches off the road and on to the opposite side of the sidewalk. Took two steps and found a companion for my newly acquired dime..............










Tell Me, How Are You Still In Business?

Amanda and I decided to go to the unfinished furniture store to take another look at the corner media cabinet that we had seen last weekend. It's about an hour drive each way to Salisbury, MA. We hauled ourselves up the stairs and back to the corner where the cabinet was located. This time we came armed with precise room measurements including the locations of the furniture already in the room. I brought a tape measure, too. The cabinet will fit. The salesman came to "help". This cabinet is not inexpensive so we wanted to think about it a bit. Amanda was also interested in getting a small desk with a bookcase hutch. I told the salesman the measurements that are the maximum size for the desk. He went looking around the showroom and measuring. We followed him around.
The conversation went as follows:

A - "I like that one."
D - "It won't fit. It can be no longer than 40 inches."
S - " How about this one. It's 42 inches but we can cut the ends of the top off."
D - " I think that would look rather strange. We'd have a nice ogee on the front edge with a little overhang and the sides would be flush and straight cut."
S - "I have something different in a catalog. Let's look downstairs at that."

S (pointing to pic in catalog) - "How about this one. It's 42 inches but we could cut the ends off."
D (realizing it is the same desk as the one we saw originally) - "No, I don't want to have to cut the top."
D - " We'd like to go take another look at the media cabinet while you help some other customers. By the way, do you deliver and what would be the wait time?"
S - " It would be $80 for delivery to Rockport. All our deliveries are after 3:30 pm. We could deliver it this week."
D - "Why after 3:30?"
S - "Our delivery guys are in school."

Uh, oh they use high school guys. This should be good. Large piece, small house, up stairs with hairpin turn. I don't like it.

Amanda and I headed back upstairs to take a final look. We decided that first of all we didn't like that it was made of knotty pine. It's a soft wood, damages and dents easily, and is a pain to get the knots to seal and not bleed through. The single drawer at the bottom had no glides and was merely a box riding on/in a box - wood on wood. The knobs on the doors were slightly uneven although the doors themselves were even (poor measuring job). I looked at a couple other pieces to find the doors hung poorly with one door at least 3/8 inch lower than the other on two other pieces of furniture, one wardrobe had a large crack in a panel. We decided we could do a lot better if we looked at some other stores.

So................downstairs to salesman.

A - "I've decided to think about it some more."
D - "I'm not really happy to see the uneven knobs on this piece and noticed that there were poorly hung doors on others."
S - "Really? I'd have to go look. It's probably because the floor is uneven and that has racked the doors."
D - "And left the knobs aligned with the doors misaligning?"
S - "Oh yes, that can happen."

We left. What crap. We're going to "Crate and Barrel" next weekend, all being well. We checked online and saw a cabinet that Amanda liked and should work.

Note: I have redone, republished, re-everythinged, to try to get the font size correct for the second part of this post. It just won't do it! The Html reads correctly. The post previews correctly, but every time I publish it, it is screwed up. Apologies.