Wednesday, May 25, 2005, 06:31
Safe!
Only seconds after I turned off the fluorescent light over the china cabinet Saturday night, I heard a strange scraping sound accompanied by a muffled crash.
"What was that?" I said.
I looked through the glass china cabinet doors but could not see anything that might account for the strange noise. I knew the sound had come from the china cabinet, though. So, I looked again. And then I saw it.
A platter that had been standing up along the back on the top shelf had slid down and pushed a pewter and glass candle holder against the glass door. But that wasn't all that had gotten pushed to the door. Beside it was one of the hand-painted glasses that had been my grandmother's wedding present and was also a wedding present to my husband and I from my dad. And next to that was the little Alice-in-Wonderland ceramic figurine I had received as a gift from my sister when I was a little girl.
Great. Now what was I going to do? If I opened the door, the candle holder, the glass and Alice-in-Wonderland would come tumbling out. And it didn't take much imagination for me to picture all three lying on the floor, in pieces. After considering the situation for a few minutes, I decided to leave it until morning when Randy could help me. He was already sound asleep, and I figured I would be better off asking for his help when he was wide awake and alert, rather than waking him up right now.
The next morning, I pointed out the problem to my husband. He is always so quick-thinking and decisive in an emergency that I knew he would figure out how to save the candle holder, the glass and Alice-in-Wonderland. Not that this was exactly an "emergency" -- but it would be if I tried to open that china cabinet door!
As soon as my husband saw the items leaning against the door, he reached for the door handle.
"NOOOOOO!!!" I yelled. "If you do that, everything will fall out!"
"Hmmm, yes, I guess you're right," Randy replied.
He went into the kitchen and came back a minute later with a folded up newspaper.
A newspaper?
"You carefully open the door just a fraction of an inch and I will stick the newspaper in. . .no, that won't work. The newspaper isn't stiff enough," he said.
My husband disappeared into the kitchen, and when he returned, he was holding the flap from a cardboard box.
"Okay, I think this will work," he said. "CAREFULLY open the door, but just enough so I can slide the cardboard through."
When the china cabinet door was open just enough to admit the cardboard, the glass in the door was still close enough to hold up the candle holder, the hand-painted glass and Alice-in-Wonderland.
Bit by bit, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, Randy slid the cardboard into the china cabinet and gently worked it in between the candle holder, the glass, Alice and the door so that when the cardboard was all the way in, it was holding up the glass items instead of the glass door on the china cabinet holding up the glass items.
I quickly opened the door the rest of the way, whisked Alice off the edge of the shelf and placed her on the buffet. Then I grabbed the antique platter which had caused the problem in the first place. When I was a kid, my mother used the platter to serve roast beef. The platter is white with red roses and lily-of-the-valley and gold trim around the edge. I am not 100 percent positive, but I think the platter may have belonged to my grandmother.
When the platter was out of the way, I reached for the last item -- the orange iridescent glass that had been part of my grandmother's wedding present and also part of our wedding present. At the time of our wedding, my father did not feel up to making the 250 mile trip for the ceremony. Instead, he sent the tall orange iridescent glass pitcher with the fluted rim and the matching glasses, all hand painted with blue irises, as his wedding gift. My dad died four months later.
After the platter, glass, Alice-in-Wonderland and the candle holder were safely out of the way, my husband withdrew the cardboard, set it on the floor and passed a shaky hand across his forehead.
"Talk about your adrenalin rush," he said. "Now it's going to take me the rest of the day to recover from it."
I put my arms around my shaky husband and gave him a hug.
"Thank you, Randy," I said.
"Well, I couldn't let your candle holder, grandmother's glass and Alice-in-Wonderland get broken, could I?"
I told my husband that I wasn't so worried about the candle holder, or even Alice-in-Wonderland, but that I would have really hated to see my grandmother's glass get broken.
"What are going to put against that platter to keep it from sliding again?" Randy asked.
"I know just the thing," I said.
I went down the hall to my office and got a chunk of rose quartz that is larger than a one-pound block of cheese. When I lived in the southern part of the state, chunks of rose quartz had been arranged at the base of a birch tree in the backyard of a house I rented. The previous owners of the house had picked up the rose quartz somewhere on a vacation, and when I moved out of the house, I wanted to take something to remember George and Edie, who had both passed away by that time. I did not know Edie because she had suffered a debilitating stroke and was in a nursing home, but her husband, George, used to come and change the oil on his car in my driveway, and then we would walk around the place and he would tell me all about the house, which they had built themselves as a retirement project. I knew George would approve of me taking a piece of his quartz.
"The platter won't slide with this holding it," I said, placing the chunk of rose quartz in the china cabinet.
"No," Randy said, "I don't think it will."
What had started out as a disaster in-the-making ended by the saving grace of my husband and a lowly piece of cardboard. And not only that, but George's chunk of rose quartz is now in its rightful place in the china cabinet where I should have put it long ago.
I still don't know why the platter slid forward, however. It's been in the same place for 10 years, except when I have taken it out to clean, and in all that time it has never budged so much as a millimeter. . .until Saturday evening, that is. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
P.S. Looking for a good book to read? You've come to right place!
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Monday, May 23, 2005, 16:58
Color My World (Or at Least Just the Bathroom? Please?)
It has been 12 years since the interior of our house was painted, so I figured this year would be as good a time as any to paint it again. Several months ago, I picked up some paint color sample strips, and my husband and I have been mulling over the different colors, holding them up to the walls at different times of the day and under different light conditions -- overhead lights, sunshine outside, cloudy outside. I wasn't in any hurry to pick the colors because, after all, it's been 12 years, so what's a few more months? And not only that, but we're going to have to live with the colors for a while, so why be hasty in our decision? (The house right now is eggshell white throughout the entire house; the people who were renting the house after my dad died painted it.)
Sunday afternoon I decided we might as well start with a small room, just to get our feet wet so to speak, and the bathroom seemed like a logical choice. I found the paint color we had selected for the bathroom, and off we went to the store where we planned to buy the paint.
When we arrived at the store, we made our way to the paint aisle. The salesperson showed up immediately, and my husband asked what I thought was a perfectly sensible question. "We need to cover 100 square feet. About how much of this kind of paint would we need?"
Since the color would be custom-mixed, we wanted to make sure we had enough to cover the entire bathroom without having to go back for a second quart, because if the paint is custom-mixed, I would rather not run the risk of not getting exactly the same color the second time around.
The salesperson immediately launched into telling us how experienced *she* was at painting, that *she* had owned four houses and had painted all of them, that *she* had used 100 gallons of paint, and that unless we were professional painters, we would not be able to paint as well as *she* could.
For a few seconds, I wondered if this person even worked at the store, but she was wearing the trademark shirt that all store employees wear, so I was pretty sure she was a store employee.
About a minute and a half into her soliloquy about her expertise as a painter and how *we* would never be able to paint as well as she could, presumably because we have not owned four houses and have not gone through 100 gallons of paint, and that *she* would never even use the brand of paint that the store which employs her sells, I concluded I would not buy any paint from this particular store. I told my husband I was going off to find the cat food I needed, and I left the paint aisle.
Either I am terribly old-fashioned in thinking that customer service should be all about helping the customer, or else there is a new method of salesmanship I am not aware of that requires salespeople to expound at length about how impressed they are with themselves, their skills and their own abilities.
The long and short of it is -- we went to another store where I picked up another fistful of paint color sample strips. The color we had selected from the first store did not match up exactly with the colors available at the second store, so of course, now I'm going to have to go through the color selection process all over again, holding up paint samples strips at various times of the day under various light conditions.
While we were at the second store, I also found the gold paint and the bronze paint I need to paint the mirrored door on the bathroom cabinet.
Talk about starting out small. I *thought* I was going to be painting the bathroom over Memorial Day weekend. Instead, I guess I will be painting just the bathroom *mirror* over Memorial Day weekend.
I hope this is not an omen about what lies ahead for painting the entire house.
LeAnn R. Ralph
P.S. Looking for a good book to read? You've come to right place!
P.P.S Want to comment? Click on the comments/no comments link and scroll to the bottom.