Blinds leading the blind

It's spring break...a perfect time to spiff up the house. As my husband and I sat on the couch on our first night at home in a LONG time, I casually asked, "Feel like painting?" He peeled his eyes away from the basketball game he was watching and made some kind of sound that I took to mean, "That sounds great!" So it happened that the bed was moved, the curtain rods and plug-in faceplates were taken off, and I trimmed with my little brush while he rolled with the big roller. After one windowsill and two feet of baseboard, my neck was hurting, my hand was cramping, and I was ready to shut down the home improvement show. Not so, my hard-working husband. He doesn't appreciate my style of working, which includes doing a little, then taking a break, then doing a little more, over a period of days, weeks, whatever. I was happy with my one brown wall and wanted to look at it for a while...put the bed back together, hang the pictures, and see whether or not I liked the new look. But he was into this project and NEEDED to finish it. So he did...and I went to town. I got the tires rotated...bought groceries...anything that needed doing which would keep me away long enough for him to finish painting. This made us both happy!

Of course, once the walls were finished, the curtains didn't match. I couldn't put green curtains back up when my new walls were brown and my new bedspread was blue. And since my thorough husband had already removed the old mini-blinds and curtain rods so he could paint correctly, the bare windows let the sunshine in...and our privacy out. He decided we needed new, room-darkening blinds. After all, this is spring break, and he would like to sleep past 6:30. So off we go to Lowe's. Unfortunately, they closed at 8:00 and we got there at 8:06.
So we decided to try Wal-Mart. To our surprise, they had blinds for $5! What a bargain! We had purchased blinds before at Lowe's and were prepared to pay the $16 they charged per blind (including cutting them to size for us.) My math teacher husband quickly pointed out that we could get THREE Wal-Mart blinds for the price of ONE Lowe's blind. They didn't exactly have our size, but hey...these are adjustable. Back home we go with blinds in our hands and a song in our heart.
I should have known we were in trouble right away when we couldn't figure out which bracket went on which side of the window. While Yancy was working on that problem, I was completely unrolling the paper-thin plastic blind so I could see the adjustable bar. Carefully scrutinizing the vague 4 point font directions printed on the 1inch square label, I adjusted the bar, then peeled off the sticky tape and stuck the flapping half of blind to it. Then I chose the appropriate pre-sliced tab and tore off the extra overlap.
Yancy (who doesn't need a ladder to reach the top of the window) maneuvered the rolled up blind into the brackets and....it wouldn't fit. He squeezed the "adjustable" bar (wrinkling the blind down the middle), got the ends into the bracket, and then tried to pull the bar back apart so it would be long enough to stay in the brackets. From my position on the floor (where I was rolling with laughter) he looked like a super hero trying to show off his awesome strength as he p-u-l-l-ed with all his might to no avail. There was nothing to do but take the whole thing down, reposition the brackets, and try again. After several new nail holes in his so-carefully painted window sill...I guess he'd had enough. As he was screwing the last one into place, I pointed out that it was crooked. He ignored me and continued pushing the drill with bulging arms and a twitching muscle in his clenched jaw. There was no way this bracket was winning. Even though the bracket now sticks out at an angle I'm sure the manufacturer never intended, with the screwhead literally buried in the sill, the blind hangs in our window...crooked enough that it will only roll up half-way. Did I mention there are THREE windows in our bedroom?
We decided to take a break and sleep on it. We're going to Lowe's tomorrow!