Mirror Mirror…

mirror mirrorWAIT! Do not stop reading this because you thought it was a review of the 2012 movie starring Julia Roberts and Armie Hammer! Remember when he was rumored to be playing Batman in the Justice League movie? Something tells me Ben Affleck was a much better choice. Oh, and if you happened to stumble upon this site looking for a review of that movie, well I apologize. Also, you should probably reevaluate your movie decisions.

Lindsey recently purchased some small mirrors for the Navy Room. We call it that because the color is navy blue, not because we keep our own personal fleet of ships in there. The Fifth Fleet is not anchored away in there.

Naturally when Lindsey buys something like this, she then gives it to me and says “hang this up.” And so I did. I think it looks pretty good.mirrorsI think it came up pretty well. I wish I could say that it was quite simple to do though. It probably would be if I was someone who did not care about it being straight or exact. So allow me to explain how I did it.

I started with the bottom left mirror. I found the spot where I wanted it and just tapped in a nail. I then tried to measure over 26 inches for the right one, but I could not tell if it was level. I then had an idea. I tied twine around the nail, pulled it tight to an area 26 inches away (I marked it off with a pencil) and then was able to check the string with a level (checking the tape measure was hard because the level has a magnet in it and kept pulling the tape). I then did the same thing going up, this time 18 inches. Low and behold, my top nails were exactly 26 inches apart. That made me happy.

Next came the center. Again, I could just eyeball it and probably end up pretty close, but that was not good enough. So I tied more strings and the part where they crossed was the center. Except that as I thought about it, I realized I now had two right triangles and I could use the Pythagorean Theorem to figure out the center. Guess what? Where my strings crossed was an 1/8th of an inch off where it should have been!  stringsI started to get angry and was about to rip the nails out and start over when I noticed something. One of the strings was not as tight as the others. Once I pulled it tight and remeasured, the numbers matched up and I was a happy camper. So whenever you hear someone say “why the hell would I need to know the Pythagorean Theorem?” You can say “shut up, just learn the damn thing, you never know when it will come in handy.”

Feel free to NOT tell me of an easier way to do this for next time.

Author: Ngewo

2 thoughts on “Mirror Mirror…

  1. This is one of those things you have to learn in high school and complain that you’ll never use it in real life. Then this happens.

    Reading this made me smile.

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