Ghetto rigging.
Tonight Jenny & I began working on centerpieces for Mom's party. I had a general idea of what I wanted - a photo cube with 3 wires to hold 6 pictures on each. We went to Hobby Lobby and found some wooden blocks, crafter's wire, some star & circle clips, and got some gold spray paint, and some ribbon to put around them. I bought some hot glue refills for my glue gun, and we were off to get the photos copied.
The pictures to be put on the centerpieces were pictures of Mom throughout time. I didn't want to use the original photos, especially since many of them weren't mine, so I planned to go to CVS and scan them in, edit some, and get reprints done. We headed to the CVS nearest my house, and the computer with the scanner attached was out of order. We waited 10 or so minutes for a lady at the neighboring kiosk to finish (read: get off of the phone and leave), and plugged the scanner into it, but that didn't work.
We headed to Walgreen's, and only had to wait a couple of minutes for someone to finish up with their scanner kiosk (Sidenote - why do people always use the scanner kiosk if they're not scanning?! Assholes.), and we were good to go. I went through the on-screen steps and then the system froze while the scanner was 'warming up'. We had the photo attendant restart the machine which probably took about 20 minutes. Then we did it all over again, only for the machine to end up frozen at the same step. FML.
Finally, we headed to the busier CVS a couple miles farther from my house. Lucky for us, third time's a charm! By this point in time, not only was it frigid cold but the snow was starting to look pretty foreboding. We scanned in the 72 pictures, and just an hour & a half later we were touching them up, and 30 minutes after that we were finished! Yes, it literally took 2 hours. The woman working the register actually said to us, "You should have brought some dinner, ladies!". About 15 minutes before we finished up we realized there was a portable DVD player on display right next to us, and it had a DVD in it, so we got to see the beginning of The Last Unicorn. I'd never even heard of it, but it's an animated movie from the early 80's and it has some pretty great actors doing voice work: Alan Arkin, Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow, and Angela Lansbury! Okay, maybe Angela Lansbury isn't a GREAT actress, but she's pretty damn famous so it counts.
We head home, after Jenny's car threatened to not start in the cold, to put the centerpieces together. I go to the last place I saw my glue gun, and you guessed it - not there. Not ANYWHERE for that matter. I decide to focus first on drilling the holes in the wooden blocks and then crossing the glue bridge only when I have to. Come to find out, my cordless drill is still at my parents' house from when Andy helped them with a couple of projects. I think that's okay because Andy has a corded one on the shelf...only it turns out that's not a drill; it's some weird drywall screwer or something like that that has virtually no depth and will be completely useless to me.
I found an aluminum roofing nail that I'd found in the yard the previous day (Great news, right?!) and we use it to hammer holes into the block. Getting it back out of the block takes a fight, and the holes aren't as deep as we'd like them to be, but we think we can make it work. Several blocks split as we try to hammer the holes through them. I find some wood glue and clamps to try to repair the split ones.
FINALLY we get holes in all of them, and I look around for the glue gun, to no avail. I find some spackle and decide it will work. It sort of did.
We assembled the wires and clips before we put them into the blocks, and the plan was to just twist the wire around the clip with some needlenose pliers....except Andy doesn't have any at the house. So we used regular pliers.
...You get the drift. It was a nightmare, and what should have taken us a couple hours to produce quality products, will now take a day and a half to produce shoddy work.
Such is my luck.
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