maybe the last warm friday afternoon of the year. it’s simply beautiful outside. i’m sitting on the deck and Shadow, who appears to be fully recovered, is lying on the edge of the chair next to me, hoping that i’ll hand him my bowl of carrots with peanut butter.
he’s a very hopefuly dog.
mollie is lying on the floor next to me, not sure why she doesn’t get a chair with a cushion of her own.
here’s the thing about friday; once again, as always seems to be the case anymore, i don’t know what exactly happened to the week. i did make a little progress one day on the writing project i’m doing, but as for the other days, not so good.
yesterday afternoon i had an extra free couple of hours and instead of being a GOOD person and writing, i decided to start putting together this cabinet i bought. we have this narrow place on the screened-in porch where a tall cabinet used to stand. it’s only a 20 inch opening, much smaller than your standard cabinet that you can buy in a store anywhere in springfield. i know, because i’ve been to most stores looking.
i wish we still had the old cabinet, but kevin decided he didn’t like it and dad was eager to take it over to his house and fill it with many many things. the cabinet had been dad’s, and he always loved it.
i finally found a 19 inch wide cabinet at target. it was only 34 inches tall, a little bit short, but i figured that it would probably be fine. i could always put something on top of it, another cabinet or something.
it came in a box. i got all the pieces of the cabinet out of the box and then i pulled out the instructions and the bag of many many little screws and hardward things and decided this would be a good project for kevin.
that was last week. but yesterday i realized that if i wanted the cabinet built, i should at least get through step one. this looked like the most daunting step; it was actually about eight or nine steps and i don’t know why they decided it was juse one.
i started in, though, and it wasn’t so bad once i got the hang of it. step one was all about inserting pegs into the different pieces of wood, as well as different little pieces of things that i don’t know the name of.
i finished step one and felt pretty good about things, so i decided to keep going.
step two, step three, four, five…but oh, step five. i had to screw this one piece into another piece which had already been attached to yet another piece…and the little precut hole that was supposed to be in one corner wasn’t there. it was in the opposite corner. how had this happened? i had screwed the piece in with a power screwdriver, and so then i took the screws out and turned the board around and screwed it back in…and the screws had been stripped. is that the right term? they just kept going around and around and around.
i decided to disregard this for the time being, but then i realized that now one piece of board was jutting out about a half inch from the other part, and they were definitely not supposed to be like that. damn. first i thought they WERE supposed to be like that, but then i realized my mistake.
i couldn’t figure out the problem, though, but i took the boards apart and fooled around with them a while…and for some reason they suddenly all fit together correctly. i honestly have no idea how this came about, but i was just so happy that it was starting to look like a cabinet.
i got it all put together just as my massage client showed up, and i had to show her my handiwork.
it was a little wobbly. i figured i could get kevin to brace it up with something.
he came home and did tighten things up and so it wasn’t quite so wobbly and he said that’s about as good as a “cabinet like that” would get.
a cheap crappy MUCH TO SMALL cabinet, that is.
it doesn’t look terrible, but it really doesn’t hold much of anything now. it had been filled with extra glasses – margarita glasses, martini glasses, some old fancy glasses that i don;t know exactly what they’re for. plus a large stack of plates. all this stuff had been dad’s, but he didn’t want it anymore.
people keep saying we should just have a garage sale. we don’t drink martinis, but when we have parties, people seem to like to drink martinis. i rarely make margaritas but ditto about parties. as far as the many plates go – you never know when we’ll have a big dinner party. not that we’d actually need the extra plates since i do have that set of antique china that includes SIX different sizes of SERVICE FOR AT LEAST TWELVE PEOPLE.
maybe the real issue is that gene i have of my dad’s, the one where i just don’t want to get rid of things.
amy is reading a de-clutter book and is getting rid of stuff like crazy.
i don’t have time to read some dumb book. i have cabinets to build.
ok then,
friday afternoon grace.