Jurassic Davenport

In one of those odd confluences of events that seem to happen, MB and I ended up going to Sam's Club last night with my coworker's husband. Just a few days ago, I noticed we were almost out of cheese and asked MB if I should see if my mom was planning to go to Sam's, since she shops there a lot more often than we do. (Seriously, in the five years we've had a Sam's membership through MB's job, we've been in the store three times.) MB, who hates going to Sam's Club, said that we could go ourselves. The very next day, my coworker Carrie asked me if we had a Sam's card, since she and her husband were hoping to go there to buy a pair of flat screen TV mounts. And so, last night after work, MB and I went and picked up Carrie's husband Jimmy and took him with us to the land of bulk pudding cups.

The trip itself was pretty uneventful, other than reminding me that you can buy anything at Sam's Club, up to and including a wrought iron garden gazebo and a fully-assembled tiki bar. We got back to the house just as Carrie and the kids were returning from the grocery store, so we helped her take the bags inside. As we were unloading groceries, she told Jimmy that the charity she'd called had refused to take their sleeper sofa away. The guy claimed that it was damaged, but everyone suspected he had just been too lazy to haul the sofa out to the truck. MB mentioned that he / we have been thinking about getting a sleeper sofa for our basement (which is true), and Carrie said that if we could get it out of the house before Wednesday morning -- when their floors are getting redone -- we could have it. Note, just for the record, that in no way was the sofa procuring my fault. Usually this kind of crazy venture is all on me, but not this time.

After some text messages and phone calls, it was arranged that BoMB and my dad would meet MB and me at 5:30 today to go and fetch the sofa. My parents had spent the morning cleaning out the garage at my great aunt Mary's house, and Dad brought me the cabinet I'd hoped to convert into appropriate display space for my rock and skull collection. As we were carrying it in, I got a whiff of cat pee -- not really surprising considering the cat colony that Aunt Mary maintained at her house -- but didn't worry too much about it. We set it down temporarily in the foyer, and Kitters came right over to investigate, took a good sniff, and promptly lost his mind. I had to grab him under the armpits and carry him thrashing and yowling at arms' length to the office (where he can be locked in via pet gate) to chill the hell out. Apparently he doesn't need to see other cats to get HulkSmash angry, he can just smell them. Gah.


Cat locked up, dog crated, we went to fetch the sofa. Now, we knew it was heavy. We'd sort of test-lifted it a bit and Carrie had warned us. That's why we brought two other guys along, after all. Well...have you ever seen the Craigslist ad about the stegosaurus sofa (one of my all-time favorites)? That sofa may have been a stegosaurus, but this one is a brachiosaurus. Not so much for the height, but because this thing has got to weigh at least 350 pounds, and is also sort of scaly. It took maximum effort from all three guys to wrestle the beast into the house. We got it into the foyer -- the pee-stinky cabinet having been banished to the laundry room -- and paused to reconnoiter. We contemplated taking the legs off, until it became apparent they were glued on rather than screwed on. Sawing them off was suggested, but I didn't want to purposely damage a vintage piece, no matter how brachiosauruslike, and besides, we don't own a saw. Then BoMB suggested we detach the bed part of the sofabed, and carry it down to the basement in two pieces. This would have been the best plan ever, except for the design of the bed required that it be totally unfolded before it could be unbolted, and then there'd be almost no way to get it back together.

Ultimately, they decided to take the basement door off its hinges and muscle the sauropodian sofa down the stairs. I'm sure everyone will be cursing its name tomorrow as they hobble around, but it worked out fine in the end, and I have to say the sofa fits perfectly into the space chosen for it. Good thing, too, because that thing is never coming out. When we sell this house to move to the Bahamas in 50 years, the sofa is going to be part of the deal.


Included:  one sofa, approx. 350 million yrs old; surface clean only; provide 400 lbs of plant matter per day.


Not sure what we're going to do with the cabinet. It's the right shape and size to display my stuff, if I can get glass panes for the doors and get the cat to stop wanting to fight it. Can I spray Nature's Miracle onto wood?