Tonight was curtain-hanging night. It's my first time approach­ing this (as with nearly every­thing as a new pseudo-homeowner), and it is going fairly well. I couldn't find much infor­ma­tion on how high off the ground the cur­tains should hang, how far to the sides they extend, or any­thing else. So I'm wing­ing it using my own best judge­ment. Any girl read­ing this may be think­ing that a man using his own best judge­ment about cur­tains is going to screw up badly. This might be true. But I have pretty good aes­thetic instincts and a fair help­ing of com­mon sense. I think it will work out. Now let's dis­cuss how I've used an exacto knife to cut away some of the dry­wall, drilled holes with a nail and screw­driver, and am right now charg­ing up a brand new cord­less drill!

A pre­vi­ous occu­pant patched the wall exactly where the brack­ets go. He used an enor­mous amount of patch­ing com­pound and cre­ated a 1" thick con­vex bulge over the spot. It was a tumor on the wall, painted over. Even­tu­ally I'll shave the mon­strous thing off and make it smooth, but for now I cut a rec­tan­gle down into it until I had a smooth flat area where the wall nor­mally would be.

Then it was a mat­ter of putting the brack­ets up, even using a level to get the cor­rect rel­a­tive posi­tions, because hang­ing posters or any­thing else I invari­ably end up with a down­wards slant to the right when I eye­ball it. The brack­ets are mostly up at this point. The are up on the wall, but anchored only by tem­po­rary screws. I need to make the holes big­ger to get the plas­tic dry­wall anchors in, but I haven't suc­ceeded yet. I've tried expand­ing the holes with ham­mered nails, the fat­test screw­driver I have, and some things I won't men­tion; End result: noth­ing. First I ran out of tools. Then I ran out of objects I could mis­use as tools. I mut­tered about this for some time. The holes didn't get any big­ger, but I felt better.

That was what led to buy­ing a drill. As a man, I have always wanted a drill of my own. As a poor man, I've always resisted the temp­ta­tion to buy one. Being now a finan­cially com­fort­able man, I bought one tonight: a 14.4 volt cord­less Dura­bilt that came with a charger and 2 bat­ter­ies and a dozen bits. I picked up a cheap bit set in case I needed it (so I tell myself).

By the time I got home it was 10 and the drill will be unus­able for an hour until the bat­tery charges, so the drilling will have to wait for tomor­row. I'm not cruel enough of a neigh­bor to start drilling walls at 11 PM. Yes, there have been sev­eral 4 AM smoke alarms, but that was acci­den­tal, not that the neigh­bors care about the difference.

I'm stuck for the night on the cur­tains and still stuck on my other ongo­ing project: get­ting a TV stand. I bought one at Nebraska Fur­ni­ture Mart made specif­i­cally for my TV, but didn't like it after it was assem­bled. So I'm going to return it. In the mean­time I found an awe­some one at Best Buy and bought it last night when my sis­ter was over (free labor!). How­ever the TV weighs more than 80 pounds and I hate to lift the damn thing again — par­tic­u­larly not onto the glass table top, tem­pered safety glass or not. Either the TV, the stand, myself, or some com­bi­na­tion will end up bro­ken. I conned Kellen into stop­ping by after class tomor­row to hang out. And, obvi­ously, to help lift the TV onto the stand. So that project has been stalled and the TV block­ing the entry­way into the apart­ment for two nights now.

I'm glad the TV stand was the last of my big pur­chases for a while. It's going to take sev­eral months to pay off all my recent pur­chases. For­tu­nately it looks like I'll get nearly all of my $1900 in fed­eral taxes back, and another $300 from the state! I made almost the same amount the year before, and only got $500 back. Which means I did some­thing wrong the year before or some­thing wrong and ille­gal this year. I hope my cal­cu­la­tions this year (actu­ally TaxAct's cal­cu­la­tions) are cor­rect, because that money will pay off a huge chunk of my fur­ni­ture or my car.

I need to fig­ure out which makes more sense to pay off. I must owe about $8000 still on the car at a pretty low inter­est rate, though I can't remem­ber what it is at the moment. The fur­ni­ture, on credit at Nebraska Fur­ni­ture Mart, is $3500 at an 18% inter­est rate. I think it's interest-free if paid off in 6 months, so I think that will be the bet­ter option by far. Instead of mak­ing big monthly car pay­ments like I did in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary, I will get that fur­ni­ture paid off and off my mind. One less monthly bill to worry about.

I need to make up a for­mal budget.