Tag Archives: La-z-boy

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Plateaus. I’ve been hovering about a pound or two on either side of 190 for a little over a month now. I’m not doing anything different than I was when I was steady losing. I’m just… stuck… in a spot where the numbers say I should be losing slowly but steadily. The obvious option – slash another hundred or two hundred calories out of the day isn’t appealing since I’m already coming in around 1800 a day. Losing even more time in the day to being out walking or on the damned exercise bike is equally unappealing. This process has already monopolized more time and effort than I really wanted to allocate for it. Fifteen months in, and there’s still not one bit of this effort that has proven to be a good time. 

2. The reward for good work. The reward for good work isn’t recognition, or accolades, or more money, it’s simply being assigned more work. In some cases, it’s being assigned more work that someone else in your work unit can’t or won’t do. Not only does that become a bit awkward when passing in the hall, but it’s also a bit agitating in that I don’t have the stomach to just let projects die on the vine because I don’t want to work on them. I wish I did. In the government there seems to be a whole cottage industry in being able to duck assignments you don’t want just by quietly refusing to do a damned thing with them. As I trundle into the last third of my career, I wonder if it isn’t time to take a page out of that book since there are no obvious consequences.

3. Buyer’s remorse. I bought a spanking new La-Z-Boy recliner a few months ago. It’s very comfortable. It looks good. I spent at least an hour sitting in it in the showroom before making the decision that it was the one I wanted sitting in the living room for the next 10-15 years. I thought I made a solid decision. Here’s the thing… I don’t like it as much as the recliner that it replaced. I don’t enjoy the fact that it’s a rocker as much as I thought I would. Because it’s a rocker, it also comes on a raised platform, and this is where my displeasure was unexpected and something I couldn’t have reasonably accounted for in the store. I’ve always kept a dog bed on the right-hand side of wherever I ended up sitting in every living room I’ve ever had. While I watched TV or read in the evening, I’d casually dispense ear scratches or pets. Because of the raised platform configuration of this chair, I can’t sit there and pet the dog while he’s laying down without throwing myself into some oddly convoluted listing position. So, I’ve done the only reasonable thing and pulled the old recliner out of mothballs and pressed it back into service while relegating the fancy new La-Z-Boy to the sunroom/office as a comfortable place to sit during the duty day.

Goodbye to a second hand chair…

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Chair in CambridgeIt’s no surprise that I’m a man who enjoys his comforts. For fifteen years, one of those comforts was a second hand La-Z-Boy that came into my possession in 1997. Since then it moved through two college dorm rooms, a travesty of a senior-year apartment, an efficiency at the southern tip of Maryland, my bunker-style condo, Petersburg, Virginia, three months in Army storage and then onward to Ellicott City, my Memphis exile, and two houses here in the northeastern corner of Maryland.

I think it cost all of $50 way back when. A lot of furniture has passed through my hands since then, but it was the one item that stayed. Some would say it stayed longer than it FullSizeRender (5)should have, but I kept it because it was still comfortable and, maybe more importantly, because it was surprisingly sentimental. It was one of the few things still around from when I set out on my own.

It reached the end of it’s run when I moved into the new place here. Even I couldn’t come up with sufficient justification to keep a broken down, worse than threadbare, La-Z-Boy around. In the early hours of Saturday morning, I consigned it to the good earth of Cecil County. It feels like the whole thing should have been done with a bit more ceremony than simply hurling it off the back of the truck – a sad end for 17 years of good and faithful service.

Live from the basement…

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It’s only taken nine months to get this done, but I’m finally writing from the basement. It’s cool and is dark, and there are no annoying glares on the television screen. It’s possible that aside from cooking and sleeping and assorted other daily necessities, I may never leave again. That could be just because I’ve finally be reunited with my ratty old La-z-boy recliner. After collecting dust and dog hair for most of a year, I’m happy to say that it still fits like a glove… a fact that I proved by sleeping there for the better part of three hours after dinner last night.

I like to think there was something more exciting that basements and old furniture to this weekend, but unless you count yard work and early morning grocery shopping trips as excitement, that’s about as good as it gets. Now that the house is more or less how I want it (and I’ve made my peace with sticking around for a while), I suppose it’s getting to be about time to find something else to entertain myself with. Or I could just stick my nose in a book and continue ignoring whatever happens to be going on out there beyond the fence line. Yeah. It’s a pretty safe bet which one of those two things is going to happen.