I don’t know what you were doing on New Year’s Eve, but as for me: I was painting. Painting, painting, painting. In fact, I painted half the night…because I could.
First thing the next morning, I awoke to the sound of clothes pins ricocheting off the baseboard heating vents. I sat up in bed and said, “That does it! I’m going to hem those curtains today and start the New Year right.”
You see, when I first moved into my loft, I covered my windows with shower curtains held up by tension rods. I got immediate applause from my gentlemen callers, who are as busy and lazy as I am and always looking for clever life hacks. The only problem with the tension rods was that the damned things would suddenly plummet to the floor with a clatter at odd moments, usually in the middle of the night or when I was strolling around nude in my loft.
When I got word last year that somebody planned to build a luxury apartment building 10 feet away from my windows, I decided it was time to install proper curtains with permanent hardware. I zipped to a local thrift store and bought elegant, hygge drapes. Just looking at them made me feel calm and bored, which was exactly the mental state I was going for, since I knew I faced many months of pile driving, safety beepers, and similar organized mayhem.
It took me three hours to get the curtains installed. I measured everything carefully and managed to not fall off the ladder despite the raw, unbridled energy of my electric drill. When I finished, I climbed down the ladder and stood back to admire my work.
To my dismay, the curtain hems drooped and sagged into the aforementioned heating vents.
Since three hours is my limit for home-improvement projects, I shored up the hems with clothes pins and decided to deal with properly hemming them some other time. Which brings us full circle to New Year’s Day, when the arctic chill seeping through my window glass made the wooden clothes pins contract, lose their grip on the curtains, and succumb to the ravages of gravity.
A fretter by either nature or nurture, I’ve never figured out which, I brewed myself a cup of coffee and considered my options. As you may or may not know, I DO know how to sew, thanks to early childhood conditioning. The problem is: I hate to sew and generally avoid sewing if at all possible. Still, I was committed to hemming these curtains. I asked myself: Would it be via hem stitch? Basting stitch? Running stitch? Or possibly… an irreverent daisy stitch?
As I pondered my choices, my land phone rang. “Hello!” boomed the voice of a friend of mine. “Happy New Year! Can I come over?”
I sipped at my coffee. “No. I’m in the middle of an important project.”
My friend’s voice dropped to a sexy growl. “I’ve got Pringles…”
I wasn't sure exactly what a Pringle was, but I knew that I wanted one immediately. "How soon can you get here?”
“Twenty minutes.”
There’s nothing like a looming deadline to bring out my genius proportions. As I hung up the phone, an epiphany rocketed across my brain. I ran to my desk, seized my stapler, and stapled the curtain hems into place. It took me less than 3 minutes, and it looks kind of weird, but only if you look at the curtains up close…and who looks up close at curtains?
By the time my friend arrived, I was dressed in stylish clothing and ready to gorge on Pringles, which turned out to be a salty, tasty snack. And because one of my New Year’s resolutions is to be less of a swaggering braggart, I didn’t boast to my friend about my clever invention. I decided to keep my story to myself… and only share it with you and the rest of the internet.