And from a retailer POV, it's much better for them to sell me a crappy bookcase every year than to sell me a really good bookcase once.

Yeah, I think the producers realized that it was a business-model mistake to sell things that last forever and that the average person can afford.

Well, we're getting more efficient at strip-harvesting old-growth, or even secondary-growth diverse forests and feeding the trees to chip mills that employ (a handful) of local people, then trucking the tons of chips to a port and loading them on a ship and sending them to Japan, where they employ thousands to make chipboard, and fashion Sauer and O'Sullivan "furniture" kits and load them on a boat and ship them back to the US, where they're sold to us in Walmart and KMart. And then the US Forestry Service reforests with fast-growing pine, which doesn't support the variety of dependent wildlife, either plant or animal, but it can be harvested pretty quickly to perpetuate the system in place.

I think the West Elm stuff looks way better than IKEA, but that's just from pictures. As noted, I still haven't been in.

My beds are futons (non-folding) with really great thick mattresses. In fact, the single bed's mattress is better than the one I sleep on every night. I like them much better than boxsprings.

We had those for a while. We really liked them, too, although we did break the frame in an incident that shall remain unspoken.

We used to have traditional Japanese futons, too, which are super thin, but still somehow very comfortable. Bonus feature, they rolled up and stored on a shelf during the day so we could repurpose our tiny bedroom.

I wonder if its not really that the materials are more expensive but that the workmanship is -who the hell knows how to woodwork anymore except in the high-end? Now you either get a hand made wood masterpiece or something press board spit out by a machine whereas before, maybe, there were a range of well-made (if not elaborate on the low end) wooden things.

Well. I have a gigantor pile of work piled on my desk, and my boss took today off. Normally I'd be flipping out like a mammal, but instead, I'm wondering if I can get away with playing Solitaire on my iPod.

shrift, you can do whatever the fuck you want. What are they going to do, fire you? Muahahahaha!!

I have a crazy flaky lady who changed my deadline from Monday to today. After I made an appointment to take my car in for service at 4. And who is not returning my calls.

who the hell knows how to woodwork anymore except in the high-end?

I've heard it said that when they were renovating the New York Public Library in the 1990s, they had difficulty understanding exactly how some of the furniture was originally made.

shrift, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

I'm working slowly and steadily, with regular breaks to see what fandom is getting up to, and without worrying at all about deadlines. Because I have reached the point of Too Much Work where I get to laugh mockingly at anyone who comes into my office and asks if I have a minute.

All my minutes are belong to me.