Letters to Holly

Tuesday, July 25

A Long Haul

Travis, who doesn't like to ask for help, asked me for help. He needed to move a giant desk from his baby room to his attic. The desk was made by his dad when Travis was a fourth-grader. It's huge, with a depth of 32 inches and a top you could sleep on. But it only has legroom for a child. The move reqired us to slide it out of the room, through the front door, around the house to stairs running up the side of the house and into a door opening into the full attic.

I got there after work. To get it out of the nursery, we had to take the door off the hinges. Easily done. No problem. The desk barely slides out of the doorways. Travis then uses a dolly to roll it to the staircase. We get a plank to act as a ramp for the first step, but for the rest, we simply lift it one step at a time until we get to the top platform. Once there, we realize the desk is too wide to go in. Off comes that door. Still won't work. We turn it to the side. Still won't go. We take off the doorjamb. Still won't go. We remove the lock hook rom the other side. Still won't go.

Now this desk is a family treasure. Travis and Kathy can't bring themselves to get rid of it, and she intends to use at least the top part for a new dinner table. But they don't want to simply chop it up because, as they say, it's the only project his dad finished. However, we can't get the thing in the attic. He's sure they carried it out of the attive 20 years ago in one piece. We look at the top; it's obscenely wide for the desk frame and appears to be held on by a series of screws from underneath. We get to removing. Thirty screws later, it seems, hey, the top is actually glued on. We try to angle it inside, one leg at a time. Nope. Still too wide. And at this point, Travis says it's time to cut the crap and dissemble the desk. He runs downstairs to get a power saw. It's too weak to cut the desk, and he has to get the bigger saw. The back is removed, but the desk still won't go. Off comes the top. Then the legs are separated. Now we can carry in the parts and the drawers. This takes two hours.

I get home and refuse to tell Your Sis what happened. They're coming over later for wings and rasslin, and I decide this is his story to tell. a Travis story. A Travis-ty. Poor guy. It's a disatser of a project; everything went wrong. And now he has to reassemble the desk and the upstairs door.

We're taking dinner over there tonigh. Kathy mentioned slyly that we never come over.

Picture of the Day
Topher Grace as Venom in the new Spidey movie. Looks close to the comic version.



In the News
Mental Floss answers the 25 Most Important Questions Ever.

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Press Secretary Tony Snow retracted his statement last week that Bush considers embryonic stem-cell use "murder."