The Instructions Say…
“…leave the screws a little loose on the hinge brackets so they can be adjusted later.”
So says Mr. Sunshine as he reads the instructions to a friend who helped me to assemble the storage cabinets in my renewed art studio. After all, Sunshine doesn’t have thumbs, so he can’t turn the screwdriver, right? Easy excuse for getting out of work and getting to boss people around, I think.
Mr. Sunshine carefully watched us assemble this cabinet and other items. I truly think Mr. Sunshine was an engineer in a former life as he always intently watches things being done, assembled, deconstructed, stacked, and he loves tools, or perhaps he plans on becoming one in a future incarnation. He is always a part of any activity like this, not just on hand, but within it as much as I will safely let him.
Perhaps here he’s taking notes so that one morning I’ll wake up and the cabinet will be disassembled, just for fun.
This is what I’ve been working on this past week, as often as possible, which includes late…late into the night, moving things out of the 8×10 spare bedroom, cleaning, painting, moving the new things in and stocking the shelves with my art materials, all on one of the hottest weekends in the year, mid-90s with high humidity. The cats were thrilled with their new playground as they had boxes of stuff everywhere—on my bed, all around my bed, in the bathtub, on the kitchen table, and I had to move a fair amount of it out onto the deck, where they don’t go. Part of the challenge wasn’t only moving it around in a tiny house with narrow doorways but keeping things out of their reach they shouldn’t get into, and stacking things so they could hold the weight of potentially three large curious black cats who might leap onto it and wrestle with each other.
However, they’ve grown tired of it, and of not having my lap available as often as usual. I’m a little tired of it too, but I’m down to the last item to be moved in and the last of the materials, for framing, put away. Then we can all spend some time in our new room.
The friend who helped me—”Uncle Tim”, a neighbor formerly owned by a tortie named Sweetie and constant friend of cats—gets a little supervision from Jelly Bean and some encouraging head-butts from Mimi.
