Tag: Furniture

  • ODDS and ENDS: Couch or Sofa, Tottenham Fans, and “Hundreds of Beavers”

    (‘Cuz you woke up in the mornin’ with initiative to move…)

    Do you use the term couch or sofa? Do you use them interchangeable? In fact, a couch is an informal – less structured piece of furniture, while a sofa is more formal in function and design. I say all of this because I am going couch/sofa shopping this weekend. Yeah, our livingroom couch is on its last leg being that it’s kind’a broken just enough to let us know it needs to be replaced, but not broken so much as to be unusable. The wife and I are about the spend a morning, and possible an afternoon, asking ourselves the “Fight Club” question; “What kind of couch defines me as a person?” I’m going with gray, or a navy blue; That defines me quite well as a person.

    I have written before about my odd interactions with other Tottenham fans in New York. Most of the time, I see someone with Tottenham gear on, and I’ll say something to them about the team, or say “Come on you, Spurs!” They react by saying, “What?” or “This isn’t mine, I’m borrowing it.” But the other day, as I had my Tottenham scarf on, a woman yelled at me, “How about that Liverpool match!?!” She was talking about the Carabao Cup match on Wednesday where the most confusing team in all of football, Tottenham Hotspur, managed to beat one of the best teams in the world – Liverpool. But… I wasn’t able to watch the match or see the highlights, yet I knew that they had won… All I could say to the woman was, “I didn’t watch it, but I know they won!” Not the stirring response she was looking for, I know.

    And I want to end with a movie I just watched, and I might review later. It is one of the most original comedies I have seen in a very a very long time. It’s called “Hundreds of Beavers.” Just… just watch the trailer, is all I ask.

  • Moving Stuff Around

    After Thanksgiving, like the day after, is when we put up our Christmas decorations. And to be honest, we never had a good place to put our tree. The curse of a small NYC apartment: There is a never a good place for anything.

    But this year, the wife came up with a good idea, which was to move our lounge-sofa away from our windows, and place the tree there. The tree looked nice in that location, and with all the other decoration we put up, it looked very festive, but cluttered – a Christmas explosion.

    Anyway, I mentioned before that we take everything down after New Year’s, but with the holiday on a Monday, and everyone back to life on Tuesday, we didn’t get around to cleaning up until this weekend. It took all day Saturday, but we got it done. Life had returned to normal, but we decided not to move the sofa back. We were tired, and ready to relax.

    And something amazing happened.

    The new placement of the sofa has changed the whole mood and flow of our apartment. You could logically assume that we were just reacting to something being “new” and in time it will wear off. But I have to admit, for the past two days our home has felt different, more home like, peaceful, calmer even.

    Is it possible that the placement of the sofa was holding us back? Does anyone remember Feng Shui? That was a pop-culture thing, right? Was that real or something made up to sell sofas?

    The funny thing is that I remember being a kid and my parents would do something like this very randomly, like every few years; that they would get a bug in their ear and just start rearranging the furniture in the home, and then talk about how much better everything felt.

    So, I have discovered another way that I am slowly becoming my parents. Not that I mind.

    No… Maybe the better way to think about this is that I am coming to a better understanding of who my parents were.