Assembly required

(Emma’s birthday present. Photo by Robin. April 2007)

It doesn’t look like much, does it? It was much more intimidating in real life. This photo just doesn’t do it justice. There are four (four!) pages of instructions and about 35 pieces to this thing.

Because Emma’s parents occasionally read the blog, I’m not going to say what it is (or show you the “after” photo). I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon putting it together. Yes, me. I originally asked M the Elder to do it. He suggested I get M the Younger to do it. M the Younger didn’t have time so I did it myself.

I sometimes think I’m mentally impaired when it comes to pictorial directions. Or symbols. I’m terrible with symbols. A good example: When we lived in London (England) we had a washer in the flat. Instead of words all the dials and buttons had symbols. I used that washer for weeks not knowing what cycle I was using. I’d just pick one and hope for the best. In my own defense, M the Elder couldn’t figure out the symbols either. We eventually located the manual for it and all became clear. Or mostly clear. I still question some of those symbols.

Give me written directions and I can follow along quite nicely. Give me pictures and I feel like it’s all a foreign language.

But I managed to muddle my way through the pictures and figure out slot A, piece Z, and how to insert XX into YY. (That sounds a little obscene, doesn’t it? It’s true, though. There was an XX that went with YY.)

Speaking of XX and YY, the birds around here have officially declared it to be Spring. They’re twitterpated. If you’ve ever seen the movie Bambi, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen it, what I’m saying is that they’re singing, dancing, and mating. The preferred mating spot is right in front of the living room and dining room windows.

I created a monster when I posted about spam (here and here) a few weeks ago. Every day I have a ton of spam (filtered from the blog comments) to sort through. This one cracked me up:

HI everybody. I have spent cool weekends! Me and my friend bought viagra and
all our university group went to the forest. We hadn’t tried viagra before, but – recommend to try – won’t be sorry! We bought anonymously .

Were they having an orgy in the forest or what?

I must be easily amused because I found these funny too:

Hi everybody! Does anybody know what is VIAGRA? i tried it and was be wery happy!!!!

Hi everybody! Does anybody know what is levitra? What a shirt? I go crazy about this!

Maybe the spammers are twitterpated, too. I had to delete 156 of those suckers today. Of course I’m killing myself by writing about it again. Just the mention is probably enough to double the spamming fun.

I stopped by Wally World again today to visit with friends. Good times. I don’t miss working and I don’t miss Wal-Mart, but I do miss some of the people. I think if I were to go back to work there, that would be why. The people. And the morning joke.

Today’s weather shot:

Sunrise was similar to the orange-red sunset we had the other day. Very pretty. It was so still out there this morning that the pond looks almost like glass.

I’m glad the gusty winds have departed. They were starting to drive me a little crazy with all that roaring, moaning, huffing, puffing, and rattling. Sounds like the wind was also twitterpated.

Guess it’s that time of the year. 🙂