MHA #2 | Friday Evening

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie and Diego had passed a real rite of passage as a long-term, cohabitating couple this evening: they had gone on a date to IKEA.

(And yes, Annie had insisted that this shopping trip was a date. There had been golf pencils and lingonberries involved as well as picking out furniture with umlauts, okay? Date.)

And of course, now, they were back home with their spoils spread out on the floor in the form of a set of unassembled shelves, their associated little pack of hardware, beer (necessary), and the set of directions that Annie was now considering.

"Huh, this is fun. They just use this little cartoon man to tell you what to do," she said, flipping the page over to show Diego. "Probably so they don't have to translate it from Swedish."

Something like that, Annie.

[for the fella!]

Comments

[defenderofdesmoines]

"All I did as a bat was get stuck in Kitty's hair." Though at least Rey had gotten to do some sparkly magic or whatever, so that had been cool. "But yeah, agreed. Even if I'd rather you didn't get turned into a cat again anytime soon. You're much cuter as a person."

Though secretly Annie was sort of delighted that for once, something weird had happened to him and not to her.

[knife_bender]

"I'd like to avoid it too." He had missed having opposable thumbs.

"Please tell me these things are labeled," he said, lifting up one of the flimsy particle boards.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"No...." Annie said slowly, referencing the directions. "But it looks like we're supposed to have two?"

She peered at the particle board, and then at a different, slightly thicker component. "Unless this is supposed to be that piece."

This was why it was useful to actually label things.

[knife_bender]

"That doesn't make any sense." None of this made any sense. Why wasn't anything labeled? "Maybe we're missing a piece?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Maybe?" Annie agreed skeptically, gingerly poking around in the cardboard to see if they were missing something obvious. "Maybe we should just use this one since it's close? Maybe they're not supposed to be identical?"

No, Annie.

[knife_bender]

He shrugged. "Sure, why not? Particle board is particle board."

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie moved the definitely-incorrect piece of particle board over to join its not-mate, frowning at the instructions.

"I also don't really know what this means," she added, pointing to a diagram indicating a piece of hardware with a bunch of little symbols next to it, including a triangle with an exclamation point inside it. "Seems important?"

Probably?

[knife_bender]

"I guess?" he said. "Maybe it's the key to everything and this will suddenly make sense."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Do we even have one?" Annie wondered, starting to consider whether this was really worth it. "I don't see anything that looks like that."

They totally had one. She just hadn't looked that carefully and was unreasonably expecting the drawing to be more accurate than it was.

[knife_bender]

"Is it..." He shuffled some pieces around, probably losing more in the process, before picking up some random object. "This thingy?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie squinted at the object, leaning into Diego to look from it to the instructions.

"Yes?" No, and these shelves were so doomed. "I wonder what it does."

Maybe they'd find out further in the instructions, considering they hadn't ventured beyond the first three pages.

[knife_bender]

It shouldn't take three pages to build a shelf!

"These instructions could be in Swedish and it'd make just as much sense as the ones in English."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"The diagrams don't help, either," Annie added with a sigh, scooting in a little closer to press another kiss to Diego's cheek, as that seemed to be a better use of everyone's time. "It's like a three-dimensional puzzle."

A puzzle with potentially missing pieces, that needed to be able to hold things.

[knife_bender]

"Maybe we just need to step away from the whole thing for a bit." Or forever. "Maybe we're thinking about it too hard."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"We probably should take a break," Annie agreed, moving to set the instructions aside because looking at them was starting to make her kind of frustrated. "Come back to it with fresh eyes?"

In three to six weeks, maybe.

[knife_bender]

"Good idea." It was either that, or just slap it together without using the instructions which would probably be a disaster. "Right now this shelf seems like it needs an engineer or something."

[defenderofdesmoines]

Look, maybe intuition was the way to go on this, actually. Instructions were just getting in the way.

"It's supposed to be easy," Annie grumbled, gathering up the hardware into a little pile so they didn't lose anything. (It was probably too late on the front.) "Like, half the fun of IKEA is that you get to walk through all the showrooms and eat meatballs, and the other half is that this stuff goes together like nothing."

Unless you got a massive weird shelf and refused to actually be patient with the directions.

[knife_bender]

"Maybe the meatballs are messing with our spatial reasoning," he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. "That's why we're not getting it."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I'll accept that explanation," Annie decided, cuddling up to him a bit more. "At least we don't need it, like, immediately. It's not like an emergency shelf."

Considering they still didn't even know what they were putting on it.

[knife_bender]

"Do emergency shelves exist?" he asked, sounding amused.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I'm sure they do somewhere," Annie told him airily, because yeah, now that he'd repeated it, that didn't sound like a real thing. But she wasn't going to back down. "In case you need a shelf in a hurry."

[knife_bender]

"In case you really need to put something on display in a hurry," he said. "I'm sure that's happened before."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"You don't know that it hasn't," Annie countered, shifting around to kiss him because she didn't have a better comeback than that. So kisses would just have to do.

[knife_bender]

You know what? He was fine with not having the last word when it came with kisses. This was much better than building a shelf.

[defenderofdesmoines]

Kissing was a lot better than building a shelf! (And it also would strengthen Annie's argument that this whole thing had been a date, too.)

Annie smiled into the kiss, nipping lightly at Diego's lower lip as she wrapped an arm across him. Like, just in case he was thinking of turning his attention back to building that shelf or something instead of keeping it here on her.