The Fight-Over Lamp

On Tuesday, college counseling was doing a session with my students all day, so Zac and I planned to both take the day off and go furniture shopping.  It ended up working out perfectly because this morning we were also scheduled to go to the lawyer's office to sign the closing documents for the Ryan Road house. So we did that first thing, then spent the rest of the day at Lowe's and furniture stores. The problem is that we really love modern furniture, but it is way too expensive. At a regular furniture store, we picked out a mid-century modern sectional couch we liked and got a horrifying estimate of how much it would cost. So after spending a day shopping, we ended up agreeing to just buy a couch online from Wayfair, because it would be way cheaper.

But the day was not a total loss. The last place we went was this awesome consignment store called the Chesire Cat under Cameron Village, that we found entirely on accident. We'd never been in it before, but it was amazing. It was huge and had a ton of great old stuff like original mid-century modern furniture and this tray that particularly tickled my fancy for some reason.

We had a lot of self control until we saw The Lamp. It was love at first sight, and we decided to get it. We couldn't quite decide if it was beautiful, or so hideous that it was cool again. At the checkout desk, another lady was in line behind us, and we were chatting with her about it and she said, "Yeah, it's kind of like the leg lamp."

After we picked up the kids from daycare and kindergarten and were nearly home, we told them about our day and how we'd only gotten one thing, but it wasn't a couch. Zac said, "We got an awesome lamp. This is going to be the thing you two fight over when we die." We then had to discuss with Alice at length about how we weren't actually going to die for a long time.

When we got home, Zac got the lamp out of the van and carefully carried it to the front door. Simon, who hadn't appeared to be paying attention to our earlier conversation, saw it and said with great excitement, "Is that the fight-over lamp?"

And that, great-grandchildren, is how The Fight-Over Lamp got its name.