Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The Good the Bad and the Ikea

Shopping at Ikea will save $$ too.

Every job has its pros and cons and trucking is a 24/7/365 kinda business, but for the most part we Tumbleweeds have pretty normal hours.

The loads that we take usually have ample time built in to drive from the shipper to the receiver without much stress. There's plenty of time for breaks, meals, and sleep without keeping vampire hours.

But every now and then, we get a grocery warehouse load, (may a pox be inflicted upon them and their donkeys) and for some reason those places like to get their Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs in the middle of the night.

Because of the hours of service rules, this means we have to finagle our day so that we are driving in the wee hours.

This is definitely a con. People are meant to be sleeping in the wee hours (and sometimes when the hours aren't wee). It's not natural to be up a 2 am, much less working.

I need a lot of sleep to maintain my cheery disposition.

This week we had a pro and con load all in one.



Because we had plenty of time and we were going through Minneapolis, we were able to stop at Ikea and feel like skinny, urbane Europeans for a while. This was the pro.

On the con side, we had to deliver at 2 am in the middle of nowhere Iowa, then drive 200 miles to get to the edge of nowhere Iowa by 9 am.

All the shiny, cheap, Swedish home furnishings in the world don't make up for me being up in the middle of the night. But it could have been worse, we could have been in New Jersey.

Here are some Ikea facts:

Ikea sells every kind of home furnishing imaginable, and in some countries, even the home.

Ikea was founded in 1943 by Swedish dude Ingvar Kamprad because he couldn't fit a chair into his car.

There are over 300 stores in 35 countries and their catalog is printed in 27 languages.

The stores are laid out like rooms, so that you can see how their products look put together; their furniture is sold "ready to assemble". (Some people are really good at this.)


Their stuff is cheap but it's also sleek and good looking. Much like the Swedish people themselves. (And I know what I'm talking about here because I was on a Swedish military frigate once, and every man and woman on that ship was so creamy and beautiful that it made me want to walk the plank.)

A typical Ikea store is roughly the size of Lichtenstein and by the time you get through all of it you will be so hungry that the $2 Swedish meatballs with lingonberry sauce will seem like a good idea.

All the products have Swedish names on their packaging and if you try to say them out loud you turn into the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.



***

We spent over 3 hours there. It was Saturday and every person in Minnesota and possibly South Dakota was there. It was a mistake to shop on the busiest day of the week, as crowds give me the heebie-jeebies.

We bought a blanket and a cheese grater.

But really good looking ones, though.


*****

Even though this post is chock-full of Ikea talk and great links, no one is paying me for it. That Swedish Chef is a real snål oäkting.

13 comments:

  1. If I don't get a good 18 hours of sleep a day I'm just not myself.

    And were you dissing IKEA meatballs with ligonberry sauce? We dine out at IKEA sometimes just for those.

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  2. Christian, I think those of us with bigger brains require more sleep. It seems like a fact or something.

    Also, my frugality doesn't allow me to diss $2 meatballs, really. But I think they are stretching the definition of "meat".

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  3. Haha, I got the best cheese grater from there: It has a container to catch the cheese and a lid for storing the grated cheese! Gotta love Ikea!

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  4. Steph, that's the one we got! Wait, I don't think it has a lid. I'll have to double-check, I may have gotten an even cheaper model, although that hardly seems possible.

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  5. Hey! That was MY local IKEA for a while. Too bad it's right by the Mall of America and close to the airport because OMG, the traffic around there is horrendous. Luckily there's also a Sonic nearby so you can fuel up on frozen cherry limeade to quell any urges you get to drive right over errant pedestrians on your way into the Ikea parking lot. :) There's a tip for you. Next time, Sonic first, Ikea second. You're welcome!

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  6. Veg, dude I KNOW. The traffic was even crazy IN the store! I almost had to kill several people in the blanket department.

    We did the Mall of America once too. Mainly because they have parking for big trucks. At least there's some elbow room in the mall, though.

    I could go for a cherry-limeade right now. I wonder if we could fit the truck in there? :/

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  7. Of all the things that pique (hope that's how you spell and use that word) my curiousity, wondering how you found the characters to type that Swedish word makes me most curious. Hats off to your researching abilities for even finding a real Swedish word but to figure out how to type those little symbols over the letters is truly amazing.
    P.S. I got back a few of the missing pics. Got the first one of Jas in mid lick but not the 2nd. Guess they'll eventually all show up.

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  8. Cari, the Google and my copy and paste skills are truly phenomenal.

    I just hope the Swedish Chef realizes that I was trying to be funny because even though he is a snål oäkting, I really love him.

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  9. Now I must know--What the heck is snal oakting and how in the world do you get the little symbols to show up? Is it like typing a hyperlink where just typing it out turns it into a link. One reason I'm so obsessed by the symbols is because we just learned how to use the symbols option in Word in my computer class and I was blown away by how many little symbols there are. Who knew? I'm also learning all kinds of new math symbols that I never knew existed in my algebra class.

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  10. Now I must know--What the heck is snal oakting and how in the world do you get the little symbols to show up? Is it like typing a hyperlink where just typing it out turns it into a link. One reason I'm so obsessed by the symbols is because we just learned how to use the symbols option in Word in my computer class and I was blown away by how many little symbols there are. Who knew? I'm also learning all kinds of new math symbols that I never knew existed in my algebra class.

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  11. Cari, I found a translation website, typed in the English words "stingy bastard" and it translated it to the Swedish snål oäkting. Then I copied and pasted those words and voilà! the little symbol came with it.

    Btw, if you copy and paste snål oäkting into the Google you get some very... strange websites and I do not recommend it. Very probably I will be banned from Sweden.

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  12. Ikea is such a time-hole. 30 Rock did a funny episode about it last week.

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  13. Carrie, it IS!

    I love 30 Rock! But we don't have a tv in the truck and at home we only get one channel, so we get old episodes from the library on DVD.

    We're behind on everything good!

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