A Room with a View

I've lived with six men in my life.

OK.  One was a brother, two were Fathers, two are sons and the poor, put-upon Big Daddy.

They all have some things in common.  Not all of these men are guilty of the same things, but a few observances in no particular order.

1. Bleach won't get out racing stripes.  Dynamite maybe, bleach no.  Buy them dark colored undies.  It's your only recourse.
   
2. During football season, you can slip in and out of the house unnoticed. 
3. Never, and I mean never, mess up the order of the Sunday newspaper.
4. They will always make better chili and barbecue.
5. They need one place for their stuff that you promise to never touch.  This can be a table top or maybe a shelf.  This spot isn't to be dusted or the contents moved for any reason.  They know exactly what is there and they don't want anything messed with.
6. They don't care how the furniture is arranged as long as they have one chair and it has a direct sight line to the TV.

It's this last item that I wanna visit with you about.

Every once in a while I take a hankering to rearrange the furniture.  Usually it has to do with my cleaning cycle.  Meaning, the house gets to the point where I'd rather just sell it than clean it.  Since that option is out of the question, I move the furniture.  

Moving the stuff around in a room forces you to clean out all the nooks and crannies and when you are done you feel transformed!  It's almost as if you had a new house-without selling it and moving to a new one.

Used to be, I could move any room I wanted by myself.  No couch was too big or TV too heavy.  I could push and shove and flip and kick.  Plug everything back in and go take a nap.

These days, with the onset of modern technology, we have cords and speakers and wires and routers and splitters and stereo and mono and picture in a picture and surround sound and Xbox.

In short, the men in my house now have to be involved, because I have no idea how any of that crap is put together.

Oh, I can unplug it all.

...and did.

But once I moved everything over to the other side of the room, Big Daddy pointed out that the cable was still pulled to the other side of the room.  That's why the TV and the rest of the electronics were over there in the first place.

I asked him what we needed to do.

He told me that 'we' needed to get under the house and pull the cable to the other side of the room and pull it through the floor.  Then 'we' were going to have to move the surround sound, and then 'we' were going to have to hook all the equipment back up and then 'we' were going to have to reprogram everything.

Oh.

He was very excited about 'our' project.

The next day, I had a lovely new living room.  The view to the TV is even better than before and the sound is most excellent.

And now I'm going to do the laundry.  And I swear by all that's holy, I won't say a freakin' word about any of their drawers.