Have a seat.

Yeah! My new living room furniture is now situated on the puppy-pee-free carpet! However, bringing in the cushy seating arrangement was not without trauma, drama and even one electronic casualty.

Just as a I had requested - but surprisingly, nonetheless, the delivery driver contacted me at my office 30 minutes before expected delivery. More impressively, the truck arrived 45 minutes later. A 15-minute fib in a world where valued customers are often given a 4-hour window during which a needed repair or delivery person will arrive to save the day is more than noteworthy. I was all the more impressed by the timely arrival during yet another rain storm - it's been monsoon season, I swear!

The three gentlemen charged with providing my new accommodations first carried in the smaller items - lamp, end tables and ottoman (complete with storage cubbies - yeehaw!). Then, it was time to bring in the sofa, which is the piece on the right in the photo. The picture does not do justice to the fact that the couch really is much larger than the loveseat on the left. Now, as objects in the rearview mirror may seem closer than the really are; to the manly-men carrying it, the sofa seemed smaller than it truly was. Or my front door seemed bigger - or something to that effect.

Of the three men attempting to squeeze a rectangular peg through a smaller rectangular hole, only one spoke English, and he was, of course, my main contact. The seven years of Spanish I took between middle school and college allowed me to eavesdrop a couple of words at a time when the guys were discussing the situation amongst themselves. For certain, I translated: "Wait", "Lift it", "No" (granted, an easy translation), and a bunch of grunting - also simple interpretations. Only one English phrase escaped the lips of the sucker still stuck outside the door, in the rain, with one end of the sofa was "Oh Shit!". That can't be good.

It turns out that I am not the only one who utters such words during times of what really is only minimal trouble. No great catastrophe - just a decent-sized annoyance. It became apparent that the cursing was simply because they had determined that the (@#&$# couch was just NOT going to get through the @#*&$#@ door! The next words I heard from the English-speaking head-dude were "Miss, do you have a drill?" If there were any hope of my being able to sit my tail on anything but the clean floor in the near future, they were going to have to remove the legs of the loveseat and sofa! And, oops, their drill wasn't charged up. Fine, no problem, I have a drill. Never operated it, but I have it and have solicited others to fix things with it for me. While I went downstairs to retrieve this critical piece of equipment, the uncharged drill of the frustrated men was attached to a plug in my dining room to charge.

In time, legs were successfully removed, foamy parts successfully brought in, and legs successfully reattached to said foamy parts of the sofa and loveseat. One of the men then returned to the outlet to check the status of charging. Nothing had happened - the "I'm Charging" light wasn't even on. He was convinced that my plug had no electricity. I assured him that it did, as I had used that very plug the day before to steam clean away dog pee! Always enjoying a good round of show-and-tell, I plugged in said cleaner and voila - it worked just fine. I maintained that his drill charger thingie is what was dead. This opinion was verified mere seconds later when he smacked the side of a charger (a move I thought only silly women who own tools but can't operate them would attempt) and it promptly sparked! Yeah, it's dead. All he could say was "oooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh". I was thinking, "Si, muerto!"

Since the smacking was so intelligently done while the lifeless apparatus was plugged in, it flipped the circuit breaker, and the lights in the living room went off. Oh, for crying out loud. Bilingual man and I went to the basement to find the appropriate breaker switch thingie to flip back on. We did and then there was light. And in that light, I could see that all of the furniture was successfully in and even the lamp had been unboxed and properly assembled for me. The very next, and last, thing I saw, were the Three Amigos walking out the front door. They didn't even say Adios!