Working it out

The manfriend bought an elliptical the other week. I can hear the groans already. Basically it comes down to these three ways to think about it:

1. He wants me to lose weight and is making a statement that I should work out when I go see him. This is an insult. (But shouldn't upset me because, well, I agree that I want to lose weight.)

B. He wants to lose weight - just accept the inevitable - I like to work out and will be the main user. Obviously.

ii. So I like to work out and it's a nice machine. He bought it around my birthday, so it could be considered a nice, big, expensive birthday gift. I wonder what he'd think if I just started referring to it as mine. (Aka. Are you going to go use my elliptical?)

Last Thursday the manfriend excitedly called me at work to announce that it was here. Fantastic. Thankfully, he used the delivery option and the box was carted to the house. A couple big, strong men* not only got it to the door, but dropped it off down in the basement where we intend on housing it. (No clothes rack for us...but maybe just more storage in the black depths of the down below.)

When I arrived Friday evening, the first words out of the manfriend's mouth were "it's here. We should set it up." (Well, after the pleasantries.)

Finally, when Sunday rolled around, the manfriend and I moseyed down to the basement. The 270 lb. box sat firmly on the floor.

Alrighty. This should be a piece of cake. After cutting along the dotted line, Styrofoam, smaller boxes, and 50 billion pieces of machinery stood before us.

Tearing through the boxes brought us face to face with the assembly instructions. Of course we found them in the last box. The picture was something like this and not overly informative:

Just kidding!  That picture is missing 93% of the numbers that were on the page.  Although this explanation has the steps written out, it was all combined in one picture, more like this:

Another difference - the steps were only explained via writing.

It took a while to figure out why there were two sets of the same directions...they're the same until step 3!  Not that it tells you which version to follow anywhere.  (I glared at those pages for a good half hour and couldn't tell which set to follow.)

It only took us three hours to assemble the elliptical...working together. And there was no yelling. I maintain that I used a stern voice once or twice, when the manfriend insisted on doing it his way without looking at the directions. (Or rather, without following my instructions since we agreed his not being a native English speaker would slow us down in that department.). Anyway, stern voice. Not yelling. Stern.

In the end, it wasn't too painful of a process and now I'm excited to try my new work out equipment.

*I'm using conjecture here. I don't actually know if they were buff and hot, I unfortunately was not there. But in my version, they were studs. With accents.