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sitting tall in Raymour and Flanigan
Tuesday, June 13 2023
At noon today I drove to Uptown Kingston mostly to look for plumbing bits to solve an annoying slow leak in the ass blaster (aka "bidet hose") in the upstairs bathroom at the cabin. First, though, I did some shopping for some things Gretchen said we needed as well as things that Gretchen never thinks to buy (corn chips, crackers, canned soup, and canned beans). I also got two different kind of beers, a four-pack of Belgian farmhouse ale and a four-pack of Russian imperial stout (yes, my beer tastes are now so fancy that my beers all come in four packs). Then I went to Herzogs and couldn't find any of the plumbing bits I needed (especially the 1/4 inch compression rings I needed to redo the ass blaster plumbing).
I spent group QA multitasking through several things, including my brother Don calling me and giving me a couple references for a job at Walmart he wants to apply for. He didn't have a last name for one of the references or a first name for the other. There are other issues, of course, such as how he can prove he's an American citizen without a birth certificate. Also, I don't think Don has any sense of how long an eight hour workday is. Finally, I have trouble imagining him making it through much more than an hour before he totally zones out on the task at hand (whatever it would be, though it wouldn't be complicated). Other tasks involved debugging a complicated issue in the mapping app involving the Dojo Javascript toolkit (which apparently, I discovered, must re-render a grid display after every change made to it, which greatly slows things down when there are 160 changes to make).
At the end of QA, I checked the news to see what had happened during Trump's first arraignment on federal charges. It had all apparently gone down without incident.
After work, Gretchen and I drove with the dogs out to 9W in hopes of buying some outdoor furniture to replace the broken old crap we have here in Hurley (all our stuff at the cabin is new and great by comparison). First we went into Target, which had a few things that fit our needs, but they were too crappy for Gretchen's tastes. So all we ended up buying was cushions for the Adirondack chairs up at the cabin.
Then we drove across Frank Sottile Blvd. to see what we could find at Lowes. Gretchen hated all the outdoor furniture there, but thought she liked the cushions there better. So we bought six cushions (as well as the plumbing bits I'd tried to buy at noon). But when we got back to the car, Gretchen could immediately see that the cushions for Target were better, so we immediately returned the ones we'd bought at Lowes.
Next we went to the new Raymour & Flanigan, a heavily-advertised furniture merchant which has become something of a punchline in our household. I expected it to be dreary and dated in there, much like their advertising campaigns. But no, the store was tastefully laid out and the furniture designs not glaringly anachronistic. This was helped somewhat by the fact that they only showed furniture in honey and timeless shades of grey (though if one looked, one could find couches with built-in cup holders). We were immediately met at the front by a saleswoman named Georgia. I'd thought we were there to look at outdoor furniture, which Raymour & Flanigan doesn't have much of, but then Gretchen wanted to check out options for a possible replacement for our teevee room couch. Our saleswoman Georgia had clearly learned somewhere that men like to be told they are tall, because she kept saying that about me whenever I sat down and tried a head rest or stretched out my legs on a built-in ottoman. (I'm neither tall nor short; at approximately 69 to 70 inches tall, I am precisely average for an American male.) We were in Raymour & Flanigan, and at some point Gretchen (without us ever committing to buying anything) said we had to get back to our car because of our dogs (it was a sunny day with temperatures in the 70s). At that point Georgia tried to interest us in looking at bedroom furniture, which we'd never said anything about needing. The upshot of all this is that the thing that makes Raymour & Flanigan so unpleasant is not really their dated advertising campaign, it's the hard sell of their floor staff.
Back home in Hurley, Raymour & Flanigan was once again a punch line. We were using it as a noun, as a verb, and we were even playing Raymour off against Flanigan (as in, "People always talk about Raymour, but they forget about Flanigan!"). For dinner, both Gretchen and I made ourselves different soups, both of us starting with a jar of shelf-stable "Tuscan wedding soup." I added black-eyed peas, green beans, tomato paste, and hot sauce to mine and quickly decided the black-eyed peas had been a mistake. As for Gretchen, she decided tonight that there is always a flavor she doesn't like in shelf-stable soup, and (since the soup tonight had come from a jar instead of a can), it had nothing to do with the container.
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