Where Will We Put the Books?

Way back in April, I told you about our getting a big screen tv that the Mister wanted with all his heart and soul. When we got the new tv, we naturally needed a new stand for it, since the old armoire we used for the last tv was woefully inadequate to house the enormous dimensions of our newest acquisiton. We looked around a bit, but everything was too black and space-age looking for us, or too expensive, or simply too ugly to abide in our house with us. I said, with some frustration, "all I want is a plain, wooden table with a shelf underneath, exactly like our coffee table in the living room". The two of us paused for a minute to let the synapses fire, and looked at each other and cried "why don't we use the coffee table in the living room!!". And so we did.

That left us without a coffee table in the living room, but we figured that wouldn't be too difficult to rectify. Silly us. We have discovered that in the 16 years since we last bought a coffee table, they have almost gone out of fashion entirely.

We were able to find lots of "ottomans as coffee table", like this, which I get is useful, only if you do not want to actually use it as a coffee table.

Can you imagine this in my house? It wouldn't stand a chance. Between the cat and the kids, this would be a raggedy mess in about 20 minutes. How are you supposed to put a drink on top of that thing? Besides, it looks like it's 6 feet tall.

There were lots of this sort of thing, too. Very Flintstoney. We do not live in a very funky or interesting house, and I certainly don't want my furniture to have more personality than me.

There was a surprising amount of what I call "Early American

Pensioner" furniture, such as this. My husband may be 50, but we are too young to have this kind of furniture in our house.

We also saw a lot of this kind of thing, that made me think that the Jetsons, and that maybe we should really all have flying cars and a Rosie the Robot maid by now. But it was proving very difficult to find a plain, wooden, relatively compact, non-ugly table for our living room. We eventually settled on a glass and metal affair that we could both live with, that did not break our budget and reminds us of no early childhood cartoons whatsoever.

Now we need a new couch.