I obsessed all day. I measured and web browsed and measured some more. I mapquested the location of a certain big box hardware store (to take advantage of a coupon I had of course). I naively assumed they would have things like door sweeps in an obvious location, and would stock tension curtain rods. Boy was I ever wrong.

The big box hardware store in question is far away from my house. It is almost so far as to make my coupon pointless. (Almost, but not quite.) I also spent far too long wandering about the place trying to locate items that they did not seem to carry in stock. Items like the curtain rods I need in order to spare my sanity. Things like vinyl door sweeps. It's a good thing there was no traffic to speak of, or I would have been very, very irritated. I did finally find the door sweeps, but not before wanting to track down the person at the flooring counter and punch them for pushing the call button 27 times in quick succession. Despite the fact that the store is a giant warehouse, I think my local hardware store, which is a chain but tiny, has a larger selection. And anyway, give me OSH any day.

I did find tension rods at a big box store of another type closer to my apartment. Though not enough of the size I wanted. And no toilet paper or paper towels of the type I use on sale either, since I was recently cleared out by the roaming hoard which is my family. Fine. I bought what they had and left.

I also tried to find, online, inexpensive wool blankets to use as extra window insulation. I searched and searched and could find nothing even remotely affordable. Then I had a brilliant idea: Army surplus.

There's no store near me, but there's lots of stuff available online. Lots and lots of stuff. From all over the world. And cheap, too. Cheaper than you could buy equivalent amounts of similar fabric. And some of the surplus blankets (like the Swiss and Italian) are supposedly pretty nice.) Yay me!

But then I started to really think about it. Blankets, especially army blankets, are made of wool, sometimes even 100% wool. Wool items, especially from a long time ago, used to be stored in moth balls. People sometimes still use mothballs. Except mothballs are made of some pretty toxic stuff, like neurological disorder-type stuff, which weirds me out because my grandmother's garage pretty much always smelled strongly of mothballs.

So what do I do? I don't want to bring mothball-smelling, chemical contaminated blankets into the apartment so that the cats and I can get sick and now I am scared to buy the blankets. I also don't want to spend a crazy amount on the windows. I also don't have the space to air things out and it's unclear if that completely dissipates the chemicals anyway, or how long that might take. (Weeks? Months?) Anyone have any experience with army surplus woolens smelling of mothballs?

I did manage to purchase one item (yesterday) that has made me insanely happy:

At least my feet will be warm...