When you live in my house, of course!!!
We all know how small my house is. I love my house, though. It'd be nice to have one more bedroom to use as an office, but then it's probably better that my computer is in the hall. Now I can be on the computer while Gracie's in the living room, instead of trying to shut her up in the office with me if I want to be on the computer.
Small houses have small rooms. I used to watch House Hunters on HGTV nearly daily; I was always amazed by people that would walk into a rather large bedroom and mutter disdainfully to their spouses, "But this master is too small!" Invariably the room would be twice the size of my bedroom, which is just large enough to have a queen-sized bed, two dressers, and my lingerie dresser.
Yes, I have enough lingerie (bras, undies, and socks) to require a separate dresser. I'm weird like that. It's mainly socks, anyhow.
This afternoon I walked into Grace's room to get her after one of her "naps" (in which she simply played for an hour and a half in her crib) and noticed it was somewhat warm in her room. As I opened the window, I felt a warmth on my feet. The little snot had turned on the baseboard heater! AGAIN!!! Last night I put tape over the dial in an effort to get her to quit doing that. It's not that she's actually cold; she doesn't understand that turning the dial will make the room warmer. It's just she's fascinated with everything she can mess with.
It was time for emergency measures. I had to rearrange her room; there was no help for it.
Since before she was born, her crib has always been pushed up against the back wall, with the long side against the wall and the short side in the corner. Now I've moved the crib 90° so that the short side is along the back wall and the long side is against the side wall. It looks WEIRD.
Because I moved the crib, now I had to move her chest of drawers and my hope chest as well. It's not really a hope chest; my grandparents finished and personalized a small chest for each of the female grandchildren, but it's not really large enough to call it a hope chest. I don't have anywhere else to put it but in Grace's room, so there it sits.
Why did it take me an hour to move three pieces of furniture?? I may be a neat and tidy person on the outside, but I harbor a packrat on the inside. This means that while my house may be neat, you really don't want to be opening up hope chests or closets or looking under cribs or beds. Like the incomparable Miss Hiss, I am a booklover. I have books piled everywhere. My friend recently sold me a bookshelf that hangs on the wall, and once it was hung, I immediately filled it with books that had been laying under my nightstand. But now I have books under my nightstand again, and nowhere else to put them! I've burdened Grace with this curse as well; she has children's books coming out her wazoo, or at least piled high on her own bookshelves.
On a sidenote: The Washington State University is affectionately known as "Wazoo," because that's what it would sound like if you pronounced WSU aloud. It's also not to be confused with the University of Washington, affectionately known as "U Dub," since apparently UW is too long to say.
After an hour of rearranging, stripping screws, plugging in, resetting, putting away, and otherwise straightening, Grace's crib is now situated away from the thermostat control. Let's hope I don't have to do that again any time soon!
PS -- Happy birthday to the IBM PC! I was going to write a whole long entry about it, but suffice it to say that now I feel somewhat old. I was reading a CNN.com article describing the first IBM PC, and in the article they felt the need to define a floppy disk. You know, the 5¼" floppy disk thingys! What they had before they had 3½" floppies, which actually weren't floppy. Which is, of course, before they had CDs and DVDs.
My newest computer wasn't even sold with a floppy drive. I could have added one for $20.
I remember my father's first computer, a Kaypro he bought in the early 1980s. When you turned it on, green writing appeared across the screen asking you to insert a disk into drive A. You had to know how to use DOS because that was the only way to navigate through the information. A GUI??? Whazzat??? No GUI on this machine; it was all text-based.
By the time my father was granted custody of us in 1985, he'd already retired the Kaypro and had moved up to an 8088, which I think was running an early version of Windows, although I'm really fuzzy on the details. I was, after all, only six years old. But I grew up with computers. From the get-go, whatever computer Dad wasn't using as his personal one became available for my sister's and my use. I was six years old and playing text-based games on the Kaypro while my dad puttered away on the 8088. At some point, something called the Internet came along, and my father signed up for Prodigy and CompuServe, and even an America Online account, before it became AOHell.
Times... they are a'changin'!