Phew!

This weekend was a killer!

If you had walked into the house on Friday, you would have seen a zillion boxes lying around. And this is despite my wife's steller attempts at unpacking a lot of stuff. Most of the unopened boxes were in my daughter's room as her room was the one that needed setting up the most. Mainly because of all the furniture we had bought for her.

Her whole room is to be a Princess room with the furniture in baby pink (what else?) and white. The modular stuff that we bought included a desk, a bed with a side table and a cupboard. The people who came to unpack for us tried to setup some of the stuff (mainly the cupboard), but they took so long in figuring out how to do it that I told them to drop it saying I will do it myself. That meant the weekend.

So on Saturday morning, I had to tear down some of the things that they had done (they had used components of some other part to build parts of the desk) and start afresh. Surprisingly, it took far less time while I was working alone as compared to the three people working to put up the cupboard. After an hour and a half, the desk was completed and installed. Another 45 minutes and all the drawers and movable parts were in. A few more minutes and the side table was done.

While I was in the middle of all this, the guys who were going to mount my plasma TV on the wall had come up. That put a STOP sign on my woodwork as I watched with trepidition as these two people first put the brace frame and then hoisted the tv (read...my heart) onto it. Now that this was done, we moved to the second room where we needed the smaller (older) tv to be mounted on it's frame as well. This chore completed, I returned to the woodwork, only to realize that it was time for lunch.

And this is no ordinary lunch. It was my favorite festival of all. Ganesh Chaturthi. This is the festival where we traditionally bring an idol of Lord Ganesh to our home and honour him for the time that he is with us (a day and a half as per our family's tradition). Because of our recent move from Singapore, we had no choice but to have the idol placed, not in our house here in Bangalore, but in my sister's house in Mumbai. This would also be the 2nd time that I have missed the festival in my entire life. I hope it never happens again. Some of my oldest childhood memories are associated with this festival and I absolutely love these two days every year.

So it was back to the carpentry and in a short while, the room looked like the one that my daughter would like and no longer like the store room that it was looking like just a few hours earlier. Most of the boxes (which were full of my daughter's stuff anyways) were promptly emptied by my wife and daughter and put in their rightful place as soon as the furniture was up. That significantly reduced the number of boxes left in the house. During all this time, I tackled the other boxes in the master bedroom which were unopened.

My Home Theatre system!

So it was another hour or so to set up all the cables, connect all the components, test the setup, configure the amplifier to suit the new environment. And then, as a bonus to myself, I also set up the Wii!

As you might recall, I bought the Wii sometime back (my daughter's birthday, to be precise) and have come to love this gaming platform. So this was connected and tested (Prince of Persia, of course) and because of the place where we have installed the TV screen, there are no shadows and unnecessary lights that fall on the screen. This makes the colours richer and a lot more fun. It is also a bonus because the screen is now almost at my eye level. This makes playing the game a lot more fun.

So all in all, it was a fairly exhausting, but fun, weekend!