Snow Day: A Picture Story

I flipped on the news this morning at 5:30 to find had forced the warm-blooded, snow-fearing residents of my town indoors – including a tucked into the door jamb – so I snuggled back into for an extra hour of sleep. I woke again at 7 to a freezing cold room, so I wrapped myself in a warm bathrobe to go check the thermostat. I’m really not the superstitious type, but an indoor temp of makes me think the natives could be right. Maybe really is evil.

My adventures in homeapartment redecoration continue to proceed as the holidays and visiting family members loom nigh. The procurement, delivery (translation: bribing of male co-workers with beer to carry heavy things up a flight of stairs), and assembly of furniture have devoured all of my evenings and most of my good humor this week.

The assembly of was relatively painless. The worst part of that whole process was dragging the gigantic cardboard box full of Styrofoam bits down the stairs and across the street to the dumpster. Try that in a 30 mph wind and you get an idea of what windsurfing might be like, only with more asphalt embedded in your knees.

Finding, buying, and assembling was significantly more difficult. And by ‘significantly’ I mean that at some point I had to stop and wonder if the Powers That Be had something against my owning a cappuccino colored, modern style, glass-doored piece of dining room furniture. It took me three weeks, eight phone calls, five trips to Target, three hundred dollars, two trips up the stairs with heavy boxes and two nights of inventing new swear words while I bloodied my knuckles to get my the way I had envisioned when I started this project.

The biggest problem was not having the right tools for the job a lot of the time. I have a small tool set my dad bought me a few years ago, including a I got for my birthday this year. The drill didn’t have enough torque to do much more than , so I wound up doing most of the screwing by hand. Which would be great if it were the fun kind, but sadly, there was none of that involved. Just a lot of vehement, filthy-mouthed, high-volume profanity and general .

It wasn’t until today, after I finished hanging curtains, putting together five chairs, a table, the sideboard, and a lamp that I found a great deal on a grunt-inducing with twice the power. It even came with a complimentary flashlight and a stud sensor, which, although it will be necessary for the rather ambitious bookshelf installation I’m planning, would serve my purposes much better if it could be programmed to detect more than one kind of .

But I’ll be fine, even if a little frustrated. Because I have learned the hard way that sometimes you have to .

All pix are copyright Me, 2006. Not that it matters.