The Invisible Ostrich - and On to IKEA

Okay, I spent the whole evening touring the Round Robin entries and tweaking the Cathma/Karen composites, dealing with snags regarding my personal trainer situation (more on that tomorrow night) and actually working out for a change.  So now it's 1:42 AM, I need a bath, and it's no time to be writing a long blog entry.  So here are the promised additional photos from the IKEA trip, with minimal wording  so you know what you're seeing.  [Fat chance.]  Maybe I'll revise it after work tomorrow - and after my session with a different trainer.  (Long story.  Can't tell it now.)

In my Tuesday night entry about the Saturday trip to IKEA, I didn't have room for photos of one of our two stops along the way: the side trip to Rooster Cogburn's Ostrich Ranch.  According to a recent story on NPR, Cogburn plans to quit the business soon, having had financial problems ever since a hot air balloon stampeded some of his birds several years ago.  That's a shame.  I always watch for the place as we approach Picacho Peak.  It's just a weird idea, an ostrich ranch, and as you know, I like weird.  I like that it's there.  I don't  want it to not be there any more.



I missed out of getting even distant pictures of the ostrich ranch from I-10, so after Dairy Queen, John drove back along the frontage road to give me another chance at it.  We didn't go in, though.  I've never actually entered the establishment.  But this time we got as far as the parking lot, and I took a few pictures. 

 


What's that you say?  There are no ostriches in the pictures?  That's because I didn't go in.  I didn't see a single ostrich, so I couldn't take a picture of one.  I used to occasionally see them from the road, I think but that no longer happens.

 

Should I have bought a hat?  How about a feather duster?

Well, what with the stop at Dairy Queen and my sleeping in that morning, we didn't have time to mess around with large flightless birds, anyway.  It was late afternoon when we finally got to IKEA. The place was crowded, possibly because of the need to furnish dorm rooms for fall. 



For those of you who may not know, IKEA is a Swedish chain of very large furniture stores.  Their corporate vision, as posted on their web site, is "Good design and function at low prices."  Basically that means modern, mostly Scandinavian style furniture, with clean lines and an emphasis on practicality. 



For fans of midcentury modern such as John and me, a trip to IKEA is almost a pilgrimage, especially since there were no IKEA stores in Arizona until recently.  Now that we're going to be refinancing the house, John wants to fix up the place a bit, with decent shelving, bathroom fixtures and possibly a new couch--or else a couple of really good lounge chairs.  Eames ones would be nice, but we can't afford that.



In fact, we don't have the money for any new furniture yet, and we don't have a large (working) vehicle for hauling such items.  So this trip to the Tempe IKEA was much like previous trips to the ones in Burbank and, if memory serves, Riverside or thereabouts.  It meant hours of walking past furniture we couldn't buy, and then coming home with small stuff.  No, we didn't buy anything you see in the next picture below, although I was intrigued to see how often smooth stones turned up in the decor at IKEA.



One thing we did buy, for the first time in our limited IKEA experience, was dinner. The oriental chicken salad was top notch:  attractive, tasty, and priced a bit less that some other places I've been.  The open face shrimp sandwich was an edible work of art.  All they asked in return for all this beauty and taste and value was that we bus our own trays afterwards. We did so, gladly.

 

Oh, what else did we buy?  I chose a turquoise wastebasket, which is at my feet here, but I was tempted to get a yellow metal trash can instead for five times as much money.  Had they not been out of yellow lids, I've have done it. I also chickened out on buying a piece of live bamboo, which would have been an attempt to redeem my failure to make such a thing grow after getting it at the New York World's Fair when I was six or seven years old.  But I did buy a plant for the office - a ficus, maybe?  I don't know from house plants.  I also got a pink put to put it in.

Dang!  2:25 AM.  Good night!

Karen