The House of Furniture

Vitaly and I were back to the House of Furniture today. It's a huge flying-saucer shaped, Soviet, glass/concrete/and steel store where some good deals on furniture are to be found, if you are willing to work at it. This is my fourth trip there related to purchasing new couches for the UEC. It's about 40 minutes from our apartment. Today, we were actually purchasing. We came prepared--cash for a down payment and bank card with ID. Generally, couches have to be ordered, so you pick out the fabric and a month later---boom---couches. So we picked out fabric (it was quite funny watching Vitaly and me picking out fabric) and then tried to pay. An endless series of questions to administrators and the small bank that was in the furniture store met with varied responses about whether or not we could use the UEC's bank card. Eventually, we were told since we were ordering furniture, and not buying something already available, we could not use the bank card. Whatever.

We then had some other funds to buy a DVD player for the UEC. Long story on that but they have basically stopped producing players that will play US zone DVDs.

After finally getting back to the UEC, we had a huge discussion about how to try to increase space in the library. I finally just said, "OK. Let's all come up with proposals and we will hash it out again." We have a substantial amount of money given just for library improvement so it seems we are going to spend some time figuring this out.

I made cookie dough tonight for the student outreach since I won't have time to do it on Friday. Here is the recipe for those curious. It is not easy to make a lot of dough at once so I would not scale the recipe for 144 servings as I did.