Beech Tree News Network

Occasionally, I’ll decide one task is worthy of all my attention for an entire day.  It has to be a task I believe I can complete in that one day, come hell or high water.  On Saturday, I took on one such task.  My goal was to clean and organize the small room in my house we call the BBC room, the one that doubles as a TV/play room for my granddaughter and a reading/writing room for me.  I t has never seemed like a particularly large room, I was soon to find out the reason for that was because of all the stuff that resided in that room.
    I bought cellular blinds a few months ago with the intention of replacing the worn and faded curtains hanging in the room.  That was as good a place as any to start, I thought.  I took down the curtains only to discover at least two vacuum cleaner canisters full of dust and dirt clung to and around the windows.  Forty-five minutes later, I was ready to hang blinds.
 I placed a bracket inside the sill and marked the screw hole.  I drove a starter nail into the wood, pulled it out then inserted the screw.  I had the wrong screw driver, so I climbed down from the back of the chair I was using as a ladder, went into the utility room where my standing tool box lives, and got another screwdriver.  That one wouldn’t work either.  I repeated the scenario until every screwdriver I own was lying in the seat of the chair I was climbing on.  Obviously, I was dealing with petrified wood, I told myself.  It was time to get out the big guns—yes, I mean the hammer.  I struck the screw head with the hammer, driving the screw into the wood while also bending the bracket.  I climbed off the chair, returned with the plyers, straightened the bracket and inserted the blind.  Hanging that one blind had taken nearly two hours, so I decided to push hanging the other blind to the end of the list—I could go straight to the hammer next time and forget the worthless screw drivers.  
My next chore involved the BBC room floor.  I decided to put a room-sized rug over the worn carpet instead of having the carpet replaced.  That would save me time and money, I reasoned.  Who wants to move out all the furniture when you can easily scrunch a rug up under table legs and book shelves?  I brushed off the Futon mattress and removed the popcorn and Cheetos from beneath the chair cushion.  I decided to vacuum behind the chair, forgetting one leg was sitting up on bricks.  I struggled with it until I had it in the middle of the floor then noticed the mess behind the Futon.  I pulled the Futon into the middle of the floor, as well as the printer table, filing cabinet, and book shelf—so much for not moving furniture.  I did, however refuse to move the big wide chest where the TV sits.  That thing has been there so long, it has become a fixture, like the drywall.
After removing old issues of “The New Yorker,” dried up markers, and naked Barbies, I was ready to head to Bowling Green to purchase my rug.  Oh, I forgot to mention, I did measure the room, although I couldn’t find the good tape measure, and I had to measure around and through all the stuff that now sat in the middle of the room.  I figured an 8X10 rug should do the trick.  I arrived back home with the rug exactly one and one-half hours before the Alabama/LSU kickoff, which was crucial if I expected any help from my husband, Garey. 
We unfurled the rug, which turned out to be three and a half feet too short in length.  “I did measure it,” I whined.  Garey never said a word, he just got out his tape measure, measured the room and came up with an accurate measurement, exactly three and a half feet longer than my measurement—danged old Chinese measuring tapes!  We put the rug back into my Captiva and drove back to the rug store at warp speed, where we picked out a 9x12 rug and returned home just after the kickoff.  We wrestled furniture and the rug around all during half-time and commercials and finally completed the task around 9:30 pm.  I collapsed in the chair, turned on a BBC mystery and sat admiring the room until my eyes fell upon the naked window.  I had forgotten about the second blind.  It served as a reminder never to say, “Come hell or high water” again…until next time.