Hanging by a thread

[peterbirks]

I started redecorating the main bedroom last December 12th. So I think that it's a fairly reasonable job to have completed it by July 15th the following year. Completed in the sense that I can now order the watdrobe, chest of drawers and bedside cabinets.

The final task was putting up a new curtain rail. Wickes' plastic curtain rails, I can now inform you, have shit screws. I had to use the old brass screws that held up the previous curtain rail -- these screws being capable of interacting with a screwdriver in the required manner, i.e., turning when you turn the screwdriver, rather than bending and twisting and generally declining to act in the proper fashion.

I was happy with the curtain track. I was not happy with the curtain hanging.

In fact, I think that I can safely say that, if there were an occupation called curtain hanging, if it was a profession that you might be offered when you went to the job centre for the 23rd time just to convince them that, yes, you were really looking for work and please keep paying my NI stamp and no, the new BMW outside did not come from drugs money; if curtain hanging was a profession, then I would probably be better at that job where you sweep up people who have been dead in a council flat for nine months along with their 36 cats (dead eight months and two weeks) and are now basically a collection of skeletons and puddles of goo, than I would be at curtain hanging.

Of course, there's no reason that I should be any good at hanging curtains. I can put together a decent bit of Excel coding. I can write 300 words to order on most matters of non-interest and make it at least not totally soporific. I can even get my shopping right (sometimes) when I go to Tesco. But the hanging of curtains thereof appears to be beyond me.

Which is somewhat irritating, because, well, surely, it shouldn't be that hard? Compared to getting the curtain track up, stable and straight, it should be a piece of piss? Well, apparently not. I followed the directions of how far apart to space the hooks, and I promptly ran out about 9 inches short of the end of the curtains. It had been murder getting those hooks in, so I was damned if I was going to take them all out again and re-space them.

And, besides, the curtains had been hanging in a very higgledy-piggledy fashion before, making merely phantom impersonations of light-blocking. If I could put up with that for eight weeks or so, surely I can put up with another few weeks of curtains which now block out the light very efficiently and, indeed, which look quite passable when either open or closed. The difficult bit is getting them from state (a) (open) to state (b) (closed) and back again.

The fuckers just don't want to slide.

Oh well, I reckon I'll have it figured out by this Christmas.

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I idled my way to Expedia this evening and saw that a premium economy return to Vegas on December 4 for two weeks was only £950, a good £200 cheaper than it had been a couple of months ago. And BA was about the same price. Not sure what BA premium economy entails, but the Virgin premium economy is great, even when the films don't work properly (often the case these days, I fear).

cheapvegas.com threw up some two week-deals ranging from the unspeakably cheap (Stratosphere for an average of $37 a night I think) to the merely reasonable (Wynn for an average of about $130 a night). When I first went to LV a decade ago, I stayed in the Strat, but I fear that my standards have risen slightly since then. Wynn for £600 a week is ridiculously good value, I suppose, but £2k for a couple of weeks in total --- well, I dunno. It would help if I could coin in a good month at cards, instead of just treading water, which is roughly what I have been doing for eight weeks now.

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Comments

[bryangb.livejournal.com]

I have come to the conclusion that plastic curtain rails are pretty much all shite, and the cheap ones are shoddy shite.

Indeed, I'm coming to think that plastic itself is turning out to have been a mistake, as only now - once things like this have been around for a decade or two - is it becoming obvious just how badly it ages and embrittles.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was only because my window is in a bay of a sloping ceiling that I bought the plastic rail -- because it had to be of a precise length. Thus it would have been harder to cut down to this exact size any "proper" curtain track.

But I may buy a nicer pole track, cut it to size and discard the end "holding" knobs (because I have two walls that can do that job.

Not for a couple of years, though!