curtains, revisited

On Saturday, I thought my post would read, "The house is clean (Amna came and cleaned, yay Amna!), the refrigerator is full (we went and bought groceries on Friday, yay groceries!), and the curtains are hung (Ellen and Evan came over to give me a hand with Home Project 1- curtains, yay Evan!)." And yet, no. The house was cleaned, the groceries were bought, the curtains were hung. And then I noticed that the curtains I had bought the day before were slightly different lengths even though they all said the same length on their packages. Evan did a super-bangup-precision-filled job hanging up the curtain rods but the curtains themselves were not up to the task of hanging evenly.

And so I went round and round with myself about whether I wanted to find other curtains, whether it was worth it, whether I should be happy to just have them up, whether I was being too fussy caring about those couple inches that didn't line up, wondering which curtains were actually 84 inches and which were either three inches more or less, depending, all the while holding myself back from actually measuring all of the curtains. Suffice it to say that I thought a lot about perfectionism- again wondering whether it is always bad to want things just so? I had gone to the trouble to enlist Evan and Ellen to help me hang them up and there were still issues with the curtains. When I told my mom about the curtains she said, Oh that's how it always is with curtains. Another piece of wisdom they would have done well to give me back in school. {Oh, by the way, when you are an adult and go out and buy curtains, don't bother trying to get them to line up evenly, they never will...} I kept wondering where I would draw the line with the curtains. What I kept coming back to, again and again, is that once again it has to do with freedom and knowing that at any given moment I am free to keep the curtains just as they are and at the same time, I am free to try and even them up. Again and again it comes back to freedom. Without it, there is much hair pulling and shoulding and generally driving myself crazy. That is what I kept in mind when I decided to move forward with project even-things-up.

So yesterday I went back to the store and bought another set of curtains in the hopes that they would be the same length (I need two pair for the large picture window in the living room and we {meaning Eva} are set on one of the pairs but not the other. The pair we are set on they are unfortunately out of more sets so we are trying to mix and match sets for a certain "look". Um. Yes, I understand that if I am not actually buying the same curtains there is a chance they will not be the same length and yet it still seems plausible that because they were made by the same company and sold in the same section and hung up as samples together and the fact that they all said 84 inches on the package, that there was a chance that they would be the same length.) And yet- no. I bought another pair of curtains and those were also a few inches shorter- possibly more- than the main set, the set we are set on, so to speak.

The good news is that I actually like the second (wait, third) pair of curtains better and may end up just going with them instead of continuing on my quest for matching lengths. Today I thought about going to another store to see if they had two more curtain panels to match the two we want to keep but I found that I was just not up to the task and neither were the kids. If I had been very inspired I could have pushed through and checked out the curtain section lickety split but an uninspired me plus two reluctant kids equals trouble at Target so I wisely stayed away. I wish I could say that the curtain project has ended, that I am happy with the results and ready to move on. I am not quite there yes, also I feel myself approaching, albeit slowly. I am definitely ready, however, to move on to Home Project 2- battery charger. In retrospect it seems as though I might have done better starting with that one. How can you go wrong replacing a battery charger? Wait. Don't answer that.