Give a Hoot - Save a Tree

With the new furniture and the removal of all my "tacky" belongings from the living room, it has been looking a little bare, despite the huge overstuffed furniture crammed against every available wall. As such, I've been getting some nice, tasteful wall coverings to class up the joint a little bit. Two new framed pictures give the room some much needed color, and distract the eye from my slovenly nature and tendency to leave empty Dr Pepper cans strewn about the place.

The primary problem I have now is that the entertainment center looks woefully undersized, now that the end tables are no longer flanking it. Particularly the one corner, where all the wires live. It's very computer-science-white-trash, right now with all the coaxial cables and what have you. So yesterday when I was out getting the Art (the Art is capitalized because it is both serious and adult) and I happened upon an artificial tree on clearance, I snapped it up faster than you could say "plastic ficus." What better way to hide unsightly cables than with a fake tree in a pot? No better way, I say.

Now, I don't know if you've ever tried to transport a five and a half foot tall artificial tree out of a store, across a parking lot, into a truck, across town, and then into an apartment, but if not let me be the first to tell you, there is no way to do it gracefully. You can't put it in a cart, because it's too tall for the doors, and you can't just carry it by the trunk, because you'll pull the base out of the pot. Instead, you have to carry it by the base and sort of squat and angle the plant each time you traverse a door. And when you walk through the parking lot, people look at you really funny-like.

Of course, this may have had something to do with the fact that my artificial ficus came 'pre-lit for [my] convenience' with little white Christmas lights, so not only was I carrying a huge fake tree through the Best Buy parking lot, I was doing it with unseasonal white-trash-style Christmas lights brushing against my face.

And of course the plant does not fit inside the truck of malfunction. No no, I must stick it in the bed for all the world to see that I see to be confused on several levels - that a) it is not Christmas and b) even if it were Christmas, that is a ficus, not a Christmas tree.

But now it is in my apartment and it looks pretty good. Frnak says that it re-tackifies my living room after all that hard work removing the swirling Madonna and rainbow mirror, but I think it's a very serious, very adult plant. I mean, come on, it's pre-lit for my convenience!