So I wake up this morning at a good, healthy 10:30, check my phone and what do I see?  It's a missed call and a message from my landlady. My landlady who lives upstairs and who wants to know when she can come downstairs to talk to me and Monica (hi, this is Vlad by the way) about... Something. 

So I start thinking. What does she want from us at 9am on a Saturday?  Did we forget to close the garage?  Was the TV too loud?  Is she working for NBC? (hi NBC!)

I call her back, tell her to come down - which she promptly does - and the conversation goes a little something like this:

her: What did you do with my drapes?
me: What?
her: I noticed you have different drapes up. What did you do with my drapes?
me: Uhm. We took them down (inside voice: because they look like something out of a mental institution)
her: I don't like having multi-colored windows, I like my windows to be uniform.

At this point I'm imagining a 1984esque world where all the drapes are a matching grey and all the tenants are matching the drapes. 

me: Well, we like blue.  Also, did you just notice this? We put them up about 2 years ago. (note: we put up the drapes about 2 years ago)
her: I don't like that. This is a major thoroughfare.  I like all of my windows to have a uniform color.

Incidentally, has anyone ever driven on a major thoroughfare, seen a pale blue drape in a window, and exploded?  I know I have. Moving on.

me: Do you... think... anyone really cares? 
her: I care.
me: Okay... Well, we kind of just like the blue.

You see what I'm doing there? I'm starting to repeat myself. This is because I don't really have an argument. I'm not really sure why there IS an argument, given that we're talking about drapes. No one argues about drapes. Drapes just kind of are.

her: I wish you talked to me about this before you did it.
me: <stunned silence>

At this point she walks off.

So now here's the dilemma. On the one hand, there is probably going to be some glaring and occasional muttering in my future. And a pissed off landlady, is a landlady who's slow to fix the garage next time it breaks. On the other hand, she legally can't do anything. We're renting the inside of this apartment and if we want to hang stuffed monkeys from the ceiling, and call them drapes, I'm pretty sure we have the right to do that. 

We'll see how this saga plays out, but for now we're keeping our pale blue. Because as Monica says, we're just not uniform drapes kind of people.

Vlad

P.S. And I actually really like our landlady. She just has... moments.