Does This Happen To You?

It started out simply enough. It always does right?

I decided to make a crown for my boss. It is his birthday this week and he seems very excited about it. He is an adorable 70 + year old man, with a fabulous sense of humor and a fascinating history behind him. He deserves a crown! I decided to keep it relatively simple with a few references to his passions (rebuilding tossed out chairs and biking). As I recalled I had the perfect adornment for one area of the crown, a small green bicyclist, I knew it would be perfect. And that is where the trouble began.

Try as I might I just can't seem to organize my art supplies. They are oozing out of every corner in my small apartment. I have them housed in clear boxes, cardboard boxes, shoe boxes, cigar boxes, large tins, large plastic jars, plastic bags, it goes on and on. And yet amid all of that stash I knew I had a small green bicyclist.

I was sure it was somewhere on my work desk, in a bag, or maybe it was in a box. I went through everything I could easily access, no luck. I went through the boxes on the shelves to the right of the desk, again no luck. I went through the massive drum size tins under my desk, dumping the contents and sifting through them. I found troll dolls, plastic squid, centipedes, rubber finger puppets, plastic babies, dog house charms, army soldiers, bowlers, and hula dancers, but no green bicyclist! By that point I had worked myself into a frenzy, I was obsessed, nothing else would work on that spot of the crown but that specific plastic green bicyclist!!! I moved more boxes and went through the broken jewelry, the containers of beads and feathers, still no luck. Maybe I had used it in something, or perhaps I tossed it out during one of my feeble attempts to clean up.

I don't take defeat easily but after almost 2 hours of searching I decided I was going to have to rethink that portion of the crown and find something else. If I still had the bicyclist I would probably find it 6 months from now while looking for something else. I had met defeat. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw a shoebox I missed, it was wedged under another box. Was it worth pulling out and going through? Probably not, but why not. So I pulled the box out started going through the contents-Styrofoam balls, toothpicks, tubes of glitter, scarabs, monopoly money, and there in the corner I saw it, a lone green bicyclist!

So now I am sneezing like a fool from all the dust I stirred up but my work area is a bit cleaner and most importantly my boss has a small green bicyclist on his crown!

Happy Birthday David.