1. GROCERY CARTS
Amuse your idling friends by asking them: What do they call grocery carts in Western North Carolina?
The answer: ‘Buggies’
2. ONE-INCH VINYL BLINDS are ubiquitous, because they’re everywhere, because you can buy them for $3.97 (at Walmart) to fit any window, for privacy, to shut out the world. Unthinking, coarse, insensitive people, along with crazed barking dogs perched atop older, frayed couches, are rough on these blinds, causing specific vinyl slats to bend, forever losing their uniformly parallel beauty. Also, like any other of our rooms’ horizontal surfaces, blinds gather dust, grease, and even larger solid chunks of life’s debris. Instead of cleaning them, rational people simply, frequently, replace them.
There is one aspect of vinyl blind replacement which I was unaware of before yesterday. When you’re tempted to use the existing mounting bracket for the new blind, make sure you have the old slide gates, because the new slide gates are shaped slightly differently, and, no matter how much you want them to slide in to hold the blinds in place, they won’t.