2009.11.16 Moving Dead Bodies
Personally, I rather like the bare wood floors of our house, and particularly the way that this along with some felt pads allows us to slide all the furniture around easily. Also carpets, and by extension - rugs, creep me out in terms of sanitary considerations. This is mostly due to helping renovate my paternal Grandmother's house, and part of which was removing the ancient carpets. I grow pale, sweaty, and queasy just contemplating what horrors would be dredged up in describing that excavation. (No, not dead bodies - that comes later.)
Regardless of my own preferences, the end result of negotiating the main living space of our house has meant that we need a rug. Partially for aesthetics, but mostly for practical purposes regarding tender tootsies and babies on cold hard floors. To that end we have tried a couple cheap rugs. They sucked. So it was that we were looking for something more suitable.
One set of Simon's maternal GrandPeanuts offered us a couple of rugs to try using in our living room. Big, old rugs actually imported from Turkmenistan. And, apparently, woven from a combination of lead and iridium. I'm talking really freaking heavy, here. I hauled them out to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, with only the most meager assistance from the wife. Having piled the rumpled rolls into the bed of the truck, it was remarked, "I hope you don't get pulled over by police, because it looks like you're moving dead bodies."
And, it kind of did look like that. Luckily: no police.
Getting the rugs into our house, and rolled out one at a time with all the associated shuffling of furniture, we eventually settled on the largest and most magnificent of them. But, of course, this was no simple process, and involved more lifting than I'm usually accustomed. And it got me to wondering, how much do these damn things weight? So I weighed the bigger one. 170 lbs. I thought about all the people I know that weight about that much...
It is information I've mentally filed, in case I ever find myself contemplating having to haul their inert forms about.