Behinder and behinder

Yesterday was supposed to be Master Hand Knitting update day, but apparently I'm still thrown off by the Presidents' Day weekend.

Progress: I wrote one paragraph for one of the knitting book reviews. Whoop dee doo.

I also went to Home Depot for the 18th time in the past week. I seem to have some sort of measuring deficit disorder.

Nina's closet door is six feet wide. Inside the closet, to the right, is a recessed area two feet deep that was formerly occupied by a built-in dresser. We pulled out the dresser (the drawers always stuck, so she never used them) and she wanted a closet rod installed crosswise in that little alcove. So I measured it. Twice, because that's what you're supposed to do, and I wrote the measurement down. I used a measuring tape I don't like, but it was the only one I could find. Every foot, it starts the inch count again, so if you want to know the total inches you have to do the conversion yourself. This is not difficult for me. I am so good at mental math that as a sixth grader, when my brother and I rode our bikes to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping, I would add up the grocery total in my head as we went through the aisles, to make sure we had enough money for everything. I was accurate down to the penny, including the tax on taxable items. (We had a single mother who was re-writing her PhD dissertation while in her first semester of medical school. Grocery shopping was the least we could do.) Nina's closet is 27" deep. I know this, because I measured it twice. And wrote it down.

I went to Home Depot to the Closet Maid aisle and got a 3' closet rod. I asked one of the workers to cut it down to 26 1/2" inches. I planned to put caps on the ends of the rod, and wanted enough clearance in case the wall width varied anywhere. I also got a 6' shelf cut down so I had 2 26 1/2" shelves. And I bought a 3' hang track which I would have to cut down myself with a hack saw.

I carefully measured the hang track, marked it, and sawed off the end. I took it to the closet and held it up against the wall. It was too short by about 3" on each end. I measured the track. 26 1/2". What the heck? I had Michael measure the closet depth. 2 feet 7 inches. It seems I somehow forgot that a foot has twelve inches. Michael charitably proposed that perhaps I thought the U.S. had actually converted to the decimal system. So back to Home Depot.

I'm not going to go into how I bought a 6' closet rod to hang curtains which will replace her closet door and came home with a rod 5'8" long.