For months now, Jessica and I have trudged up the stairs of Modern, toured the showrooms of country French (or is it French country?), and wandered the basements of English farmhouse. We've trekked through Mediterranean, Mission, and positively Medieval. We've scrutinized the construction of Scandinavian, inspected the design of Mexican, dissected the hues of Italian. Our journey has taken us through the halls of custom, factory, wood, glass, metal, whimsical, serious, practical, opulent, cheap, expensive, oak, cherry, pressed.

And still we don't have a new dining room table.

I thought shopping for a couch was tough. Looking back, that was bush league. Stretch out on a few sofas. Make sure the neck-to-sofa-arm angle is okay. Check the width so that you're solidly balanced when curled up in a fetal position "watching" baseball. Sure, nobody says that's easy. But … tables. Tables are the Bigs.

You got your round tables, your rectangular tables, your oval tables, your wide tables, your skinny tables. You got your leafs. You got your nonleafs. You got your nonleaf, extensions-hidden-underneath-at-either-end. You got your dark wood. You got your light wood. And don't get me started on the bazillion types of legs.

The biggest problem is that Jessica and I want different things.

She prefers a little table, something Tom Thumb might have used. It's not clear to me why she likes a little table. It's not clear to me because I typically don't listen to her. That's what she says, anyway. Right there in the middle of the showroom floor. It isn't true. I do listen to her. Otherwise, I wouldn't know that that's what she says. Case closed.

I prefer a big table. Something along the lines of the one in The Last Supper. Now, that was a table. Thirteen people - on one side!