Win/Win? Lose/Lose?

There are a great many things in my life that do not work. Or, at the very least, they do not work well. In this, one can see quite clearly my somewhat self-defeating tendency towards believing that I Know Best. Not just Best...maybe even Better Than That. In fact, I am sometimes deluded into a smug sense that comes with thinking that I Know Everything.

I do not.

But that doesn't stop me from trying. Which is really a rather nice quality, if you think about it. I persevere. In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I will stubbornly forge ahead with my chosen course of action. The fact that I am really only engaging in one or more denial-based behaviors is happily ignored. If I just keep trying, my less than effective methods will eventually work. I just know it! This has netted me the following:

I believed I could fix the drain in my tub. It is now held open with a paper clip.

I believed that I could come up with a more efficient strategy for fixing my errors in the lace knitting. Ripping and tinking is for suckers. I now have a sort of "tilty" shawl.

I believed that if I just put enough air in my driver's side tire, it would magically heal itself and decide to stop going flat. I spent close to fifteen dollars in quarters at the air machine. (note: I eventually gave up on this strategy and accepted that the problem was beyond my ability to fix. I asked them to look at it the next time I brought the truck in for service and it turned out to be a faulty valve stem. Free repair. If you don't count all the quarters...)

I believed that I had come up with a foolproof new strategy for getting the bills paid in a timely fashion. I now have a notice informing me that I somehow managed to forget the car payment in September. (The car people don't seem to appreciate my forward thinking approach to trying new things. They lack vision, as far as I'm concerned.)

I have been stubbornly doing battle with the blinds in my living room, insisting that the mechanism which adjusts their alignment could be corrected with continued use and just the right pressure. It mattered not that simply replacing the defective blinds would cost me well under ten dollars. This was a matter of pride!

That last one has been a doozy. It has gone on for nigh on three years now. Three years of fiddling, tweaking, twisting, pushing, pulling and even adjusting each individual blind by hand. I was not to be defeated. Surely there was some way that I, The Sheep Who Knows All, could find a way to rig this simple piece of equipment to working order. All one needs to do is look at my sterling record of home improvement to date to see that I could not fail in this endeavor!

Today, the battle ended. In a final burst of "rightness," I forced the mechanism to its limits. By God, this thing was not going to rest on my watch! Those blinds were going to be opened at the angle to which I desired! I set my feet into a comfortable stance, braced my arms and proceeded to force the wand that turns the blinds in the direction that I felt it must go.

I know the battle is over. It can't continue once you've killed your foe. The mechanism snapped and left me standing in my living room at 6:00 in the morning with closed blinds and the handle that turned them snapped off it my hand. That is a cessation in the hostilities if ever I saw one. It may not be peace...there was way too much swearing for that. But, once your nemesis is gone, there is really no sense in continuing on as a super-hero.

What I don't know is if I won the battle and proved my prowess as the Maintainer Of All Things In My Home. Was I in The Right? Am I the victor? I'm pretty sure that once you've killed something, that you get to say you've won. But now I can't get the blinds open. At all. Not one little bit. I have a cool new plastic stick with which to play...but I really wanted it to stay attached to the blinds for use in opening and closing. I think I'm the winner...

But I feel like a loser. A loser who has to sit in the dark. With a snapped off piece of her mini-blinds at her side. And the realization that she is, perhaps, not so good with the home repair.

I took a picture of it to show you. I thought it would add a little extra zing to an otherwise sort of bland, non-knitting related post.

Here's where it would have been if Blogger were accepting my attempts at photo uploading.

Another battle lost, I suppose. That's OK. I'm sure that something else will break soon and I'll get to begin doing battle all over again. I can forget about my false victory with my window blinds and move on to bigger and better battles...maybe something involving electricity or fire.

Come to think of it, that paper clip on the drain was looking a little loose this morning. I have a great idea for how I could use duct tape and a stapler to rig that up even stronger!

SA