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Up The Hill magazine (Estrella & CantaMia, Goodyear AZ), Viva magazine (PebbleCreek, Goodyear AZ), The Hamlet magazine (Palm Valley, Goodyear AZ), The Park magazine (Litchfield Park AZ), Main Street magazine (Verrado & Victory, Buckeye AZ), Mountain View magazine (Vistancia, Trilogy & Blackstone, Peoria AZ), The Front Porch magazine (Marley Park, Surprise AZ), The Grove magazine (Sterling Grove, Surprise AZ), and CB Living magazine (Corte Bella, Sun City West AZ),
From Me To You . . . November 2025
As we head towards the holiday season, I can guarantee that the majority of you will be assembling a flat-pack item or two before the end of the year. For those of you who don’t understand the term “flat-pack,” it is an item, usually furniture, that arrives in your house waiting for assembly. By you. Or a helpful spouse. Or that neighbor you suddenly become best friends with when you spot their power drill collection.
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In our house I am the assembly(wo)man and I love it. I always enjoyed putting Lego sets together as a kid—who’s kidding here, I still do. In fact, I have several thousand-plus piece sets in my house, which my family insists are “decorative” but we all know are really just socially acceptable toys for adults.
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It was not always plain sailing though. I remember when we first started buying furniture from a certain Swedish store and the many hours I wouldend the day with splinters and cracked nails, screwdriver-caused blisters and an aching back. Those instruction manuals with their wordless diagrams and mysterious stick figures made me question my intelligence, my life choices, and whether that engineering degree I never got might have been useful after all.
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But like any good relationship, we worked through our issues. I learned that those “extra” screws aren’t actually extra—they’re foreshadowing. I discovered that when the manual shows two people assembling something, it’s not a suggestion, it’s a desperate plea. I figured out that “assembly time: 45 minutes” is code for “block out your entire Saturday.”
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Now I approach each flat-pack box with the confidence of a seasoned warrior. I lay out all the pieces. I organize the hardware. I actually read the instructions first. Sometimes I even use the Allen wrench they provide instead of losing it immediately and using my own tools. And when I finish? There’s nothing quite like admiring a bookshelf you built yourself, even if it’s technically supposed to hold books rather my Lego masterpieces, which leaves one pressing question: where am I supposed to put my books? Off to the Swedish store again!
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Catherine Uretsky
Editor in Chief, Estrella Publishing