Forget Geocaching™. I've found the ultimate treasure hunting thrill right in my own home. No GPS transponder required. All you really need are a stiff back and extremely sore muscles.
Wednesday night found me rearranging the master bedroom. I hadn't intended to do it all at once. Really I hadn't. The night before I was looking through my collection of LPs. (For those of you born after 1980: LPs are to the recording industry what 8" floppy disks are the computer industry. They're like compact discs, but they're black, wobbly, and only hold about 45 minutes of music. We used to spend thousands of dollars on equipment to play them, and now I consider it a thrill to find a turntable in an electronics store. I think they call them "legacy audio equipment" now. People nowadays collect LPs for the cover art.)
My original intent was to search for any recordings I may have of Mozart's music as the girls will be studying major composers during this coming school year. We keep the LPs in a small credenza-like cabinet that has been serving as Mrs. Woody's nightstand since we moved into this house. They haven't been properly organized since the move, so I had to go through every one of them to find my classical recordings. Mrs. Woody saw me and helpfully suggested that, hey, since we're going to move that piece to another wall as part of "The Move from Hades©" anyway, I may was well move it while I had the entire collection out on the floor.
So I did.
You know how sharks begin circling whenever fish are in distress? This describes Mrs. Woody's behavior as soon as the nightstand was moved. "I'm excited to get the rest of the room done now!" she said. There was an odd sheen in her eyes as she said it. "This means it's really started, right?" she asked rhetorically.
Of course it's started. I knew only too well that once that first piece was moved, however insignificant, it would open the flood-gates and I would be committed. All the next day, when I should have had my mind on a team workshop that I was hosting, I was instead thinking, "So if I clear out all those bags of hand-me-downs for the girls and get the donatable stuff loaded in my car, I can move the armoire over to it's new place where the credenza used to be, and that would mean I could move the bookcases over..." And so it went.
No sooner did I get home than I began rearranging the bedroom. Once the armoire was moved, I figured I could just empty each bookcase (there are 5!) and move it into place, as soon as I got the bed out of the way. That meant tipping the bed up on its side so I could move all the other pieces before putting the bed back down. I first tipped the mattress, then the boxspring and - Lo! Could it be...? Maggie Raggie!
Several months ago, our Doodle Woodyette was bereft because we were certain that this particular doll had been lost forever. We assumed that on one of our frequent junkets to Ventura county, the doll had been dropped in either Grandma's house, or the cousins' house, either of which meant almost certain doom for a smallish rag doll. Searches of both houses had turned up nothing, and Doodle was nearly inconsolable for a few weeks after that. We even went on eBay a couple of months ago to find one because Doodle kept bringing up how much she missed her favorite doll. Nothing is ever as good as the original, however, and the new Maggie was smaller than the one Doodle used to have. It was okay, but it wasn't the really real Maggie.
The look on Doodle's face when she was presented with the real thing was priceless. She (Maggie) was a little the worse for dust, but otherwise in primo condition. She has not been long out of Doodle's sight since.
Anyway, happy reunions complete, I plowed ahead with the rest of the rearrangement. It took longer than I had originally estimated, but the result was a room that makes much more efficient use of space, and gives Mrs. Woody and me a sense of being in a whole new room. In fact, that first night sleeping in it reminded us both of sleeping in a hotel. Comfortable but unfamiliar.
Last night didn't feel quite as productive as I only moved one piece. It's a big piece, though, and it has a twin. Both pieces need to be in our bedroom, and represent the keystone of the remainder of "The Move from Hades©." Once those pieces are in place, we can begin moving the other rooms around, including giving the Woodyettes separate rooms for the first time. Also, it's not just a simple matter of moving a piece from point A to point B. Each piece has to be emptied first, dusted thoroughly, then moved, then items returned in an organized fashion. The carpet under each piece gets thoroughly vacuumed as well, as our furniture only gets moved once in a presidential administration. So the net move was one piece, but I'm still sore and stiff this morning.
Meet my new friend. I think he's a hip-hop star. Calls himself "Icy-Hot." I found him in the drug store under "Analgesics."
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