Maybe I should have gone to Ikea

I am consumer. Hear me charge.

A few weeks back, I decided that my office chair was on its last legs -- it's almost exactly 20 old, and really starting to come apart at the seams. So I ordered a new chair from one of the yuppie furniture stores on Queen. Today I heard that my chair was in, so I went up the street to pay the balance and pick it up. The new chair is a really well-designed chair. I'm sitting in it, now, thinking, "This is the best chair ever!" But while I was at the store, I asked about whether or not there's a loading dock to which I could pull up my car; Queen St. is not known for its wealth of parking spaces. Turns out they had a reasonable loading spot in one of the back alleys behind Queen.

"I'll be back in fifteen minutes," I said, then wandered up the back-lane. But that trip took me by the new lighting store that opened up in a former warehouse property near my local DVD place. I'd been meaning to check it out, but it's off the main roads, and was always closed at the times I thought about it. So I popped in. Next thing you know, I'd ordered a new lamp. Spending much more than I thought I'd planned to spend on a lamp. It might, possibly, be the most expensive piece of furniture I now own. Yowza. It should arrive in a week or two.

So then I was walking back from the lamp place, and I remembered that there's a new townhouse development on Richmond, over just a few blocks from me. It's right across from a set of townhouses that I'm always looking at -- I find it an attractive building. So I stopped in and picked up a package. Now I'm fantasizing about buying a townhouse. Truth is, I don't think I can come anywhere near affording it. Housing prices in Toronto are at a ridiculous high, so I feel like it's a bad time to buy (the "bubble" seems to dominate the local news cycle). But their model rooms were very pretty. Hummina.