Episode 48: What Just Happened?

Have you ever suddenly wondered how you got to where you were? For example, you find yourself alone in a row boat in the middle of Lake Michigan in the middle of a snow storm and you cannot remember how exactly you ended up there when you started at a New Year's Eve party in Toronto. (If this has ever happened to you, you need to start asking yourself some questions about your friends.)

Okay, maybe you cannot identify with that, but how about something a little less extreme. Perhaps you find yourself wedged into a seat next to a very drunk half-naked middle-aged man sporting what is supposed to be some sort of team emblem in body paint on his chest and screaming incoherent insults at the opposing team. You wonder how you got yourself into that when all you did was accept free tickets to a game from a friend.

In any case, we had a friend over for lunch a while back. Later in the afternoon we found ourselves in the guest room looking at our newly remodeled bathroom and chatting idly about something quite forgettable.

Very innocently, she suggests the room might be more "open" if we move the bed a bit. My wife is skeptical, but figures there's no harm it moving it just to see. Of course, to move the bed, we have to move a few other pieces of furniture, but what else do we have to do on a Sunday afternoon?
Had we only glanced up we may have seen the grill of the truck hauling a trailer full of doom bearing down on us, but we did no such thing.

The next thing I know, I am in the garage staining a Crosley-like wooden record player/radio/cd player a darker color (to match the other dark wood furniture) after building two new shelves for the closet and moving all the furniture from the guest room into my office (which only recently recovered from its part in the bathroom remodeling project) while my wife and our "friend" are out shopping for paint, material for curtains of some sort, and a new reading chair.

Maybe it was the fumes from the stain, but I couldn't remember how on earth things went from, "You know, if you moved the bed over there, it would open up the room." to "Hey, why don't we tear down the house and rebuild it before your parents arrive in three days for Thanksgiving?"

As I try to navigate my staining sponge around all the knobs and dials, and use q-tips to try to clean when I am not so successful at avoiding said knobs and dials with my staining sponge, I wonder if this whole thing could have been avoided somehow.