Daily Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas

Opinion

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Squarely Pegged

By Peggy McCracken

Work place is a relief

after vacation time

Whew! Vacations are tough. Right now our boss is headed inland after Hurricane Claudette washed the family's camping gear into the Gulf of Mexico.

Bad as it is, that vacation is mild compared to mine. I just finished a whirlwind week moving junk and stuff from room to room, painting walls, shining brass and refinishing a hardwood floor.

This didn't start out to be a total remodeling project. All I wanted to do was get the house clean and rid it of some green fixtures, walls and holey golden carpet.

Enter Velma Bradley to do the cleaning. She packed up stuff in boxes to get it out of her way, and my job was to sort through it, throw away the junk and put good stuff on the shelves where I intended for it to stay.

Then comes Kim Ewing, who offers her considerable decorating talents. She not only wants to advise me on colors; she wants to paint my living/dining/kitchen/hallway (which looked mostly ok like it was). "It needs color," she says, and I left town so she could paint undistracted. Wow, did she ever paint! I came home to three bright yellow walls that screamed "energy!!" while I was thinking "serenity."

I decided that, since Velma had the bathroom cleared out, I might as well use some of the 10 gallons of paint Kim had purchased. That made the adjoining room look dull, so I moved a mountain of office furniture, paperwork and books to paint it and turn it into a master bedroom.

Deciding to remove carpet in the front bedroom and turn it back into an office with hardwood floor came as a surprise to me, but it seemed like a smart move. So here I go, moving all the boxes Velma had stored in our "piling room," boxing up a ton of photos, frames, photographic equipment, vases, fake flowers and the like, and moving furniture to get to the dirty walls. Then out comes the carpet a strip at a time, and hours on my knees pulling out staples, filling nail holes and sanding.

As of this writing, I am stiff and sore, but still able to move. My new office floor is looking good, with two more sandings and three coats of polyurethane to go yet. By Saturday, I may not be moving so well.

Anyway, it is a relief to get back to work where all I have to do is open envelopes and deposit checks, create invoices and write paychecks. Which I had better get at right now.

"The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice." Proverbs 12:15, NIV

EDITOR'S NOTE: Peggy McCracken is Enterprise business manager and webmaster. Contact her at peg2@pecos.net

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Pecos Enterprise
York M. "Smokey" Briggs, Publisher
Division of Buckner News Alliance, Inc.
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