Yesterday I picked up my first recliner. It has a wooden frame with open arms and is covered with bluish-gray textured fabric. It is lightweight and has a small footprint. It is coated with a badly overpriced layer of stain-resistant fabric protection. And best of all, the footrest lever is on the left side (though I do still find myself reflexively reaching down to the right due to having been raised in a repressively sinistrophobic society).

It isn’t a wall-hugger, so I had to rearrange the furniture in my den in such a way that I’m kicking myself for not having done it years ago. The forty-something-year-old couch now sits against the opposite wall. The big glowing rectangle now sits on the floor in front of the fireplace, shielded entirely from the sun’s glare. The rocking chair sits in a corner near the fireplace, as it should. And my glorious new recliner faces the fireplace and television on the south wall. The qi flow is up a good 20-25% in this room alone. I haven’t tried out the meter in the rest of the house yet.

The Council has yet to decide what to do with the seventy-year-old armchair in which I used to do most of my sitting. The fabric is worn and torn and the springs are broken, but the frame’s still in good shape. The chair as a whole has a great deal of sentimental value, so it may be worthwhile to get new springs and upholstery. We’ll see.

Hopefully I will get as much use out of this recliner as untold generations got out of the old golden armchair, and that in, say, 2083, it’ll still offer my weary bones a decent rest.

…

I was really rooting for Pats-Niners Super Bowl: the economics major (Belichick) vs. the former Bear (Jim Harbaugh). I wasn’t that big a fan of Jim Harbaugh the player for two reasons. First, drafting him in ’87 was a sign that Chicago was starting to look beyond McMahon– which, in fairness, was probably the right move given McMahon’s injuries. The second reason was that in the immediate post-McMahon era, I thought Mike Tomczak was the Bears’ best option at QB, and that Harbaugh was a distraction. But the fact remains that Harbaugh was a Chicago Bear, and so I have to root for his 49ers against the Accomplices.