Vanessa Fox. Nude.

The problem: lots and lots of cardboard boxes. Clearly, one can’t simply stack them up in a corner of the room and turn them into furniture. I mean, one could, but spiders could hide in there and so every time you’d walk by or sit in the room or somewhere else in the house or even walk up towards the front door you would think, are big scary spiders hiding in that tower of cardboard boxes? And that’s just no way to live.

The solution? One truck (borrowed from someone who’s currently out the country and surely won’t notice his truck is gone as long as I return it before he gets back mind), one rather large tarp, lots of rope, two MacGyver-type women, and a cutting implement of some kind.

It was all going so well until we needed the sharp implement. You might instantly think knife, because you’re a smart person and it wouldn’t cross your mind that this house would contain exactly zero knives of any variety. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story about the lack of knives. You would be bored. It’s not that interesting of a story.) So, then your clever mind might jump to scissors, and yes, this house contains two of those. Sadly, both are too dull to cut through the tape on boxes.

When I ran into the dull scissors dilemma, my mind instantly went (of course) to the foil cutter on the corkscrew. And if you are wondering why a corkscrew was handy and a knife was not, well, then you and I live in completely different worlds. I live in the land of corkscrews. (And a world without shrimp, but that’s entirely unrelated.)

It worked great on the boxes, but not quite so great when I was stripping speaker wire. So, I picked up some wire strippers on my next trip to Home Depot. Oddly, it didn’t cross my mind to pick up some kind of a knife.

Mystery Guest was up for the challenge of of the truck and the tarp. We eyed the truck bed, overflowing with cardboard and styrofoam. We looked at the tarp. And the ropes.

“Do you know how to tie a knot?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. This rope came with instructions. Or maybe just a glossary of knots. You know, like fishermen use. I’ll bring it out with us.”

It was all fine until we had to thread the rope through the tarp as only one side of the tarp had holes. This was entirely our fault since we folded the tarp over. (Did I mention it was a really big tarp?) But now we needed to make our own holes. Mystery Guest went in to get some kind of cutting utensil. I had already clued her in to the wonder of the corkscrew. She brought out…

…a plastic knife!

Haha. Well, that was a funny joke. She then pulled out the corkscrew and the wire cutters. Which meant our tool arsenal consisted of:

Both of the non-plastic items barely made a dent. So, what the hell, let’s try the plastic knife! And the serrated edge sliced right on through that tarp like butter. Let this be a lesson to us all.

I would describe our knot-tying, but I feel I should end on a triumphant note. The contents of the truck didn’t fly out as I was driving to the recycling center, so I count the knots as a success. Mystery Guest was potentially feeling a bit overconfident and was ready to take to the high seas to try out the hard knocks sea-faring life just to see how far our knots would take us, but we were armed only with that plastic knife, so perhaps it’s best we rethought that plan.

She was really proud of those knots though. And her plastic knife foresight.

Next time you are stranded on an island or in a lifeboat and you have only string, a toothpick, and a pack of gum to survive the winter, I totally recommend bringing Mystery Guest along. She’s very resourceful. And can totally almost tie knots.