Wheeeeee-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup!

An "instantaneous fury"-producing sound that you groggily hear in the fairly-early morning when you are still only half-awake --- it means that someone in your family has accidentally let a roller-type window-shade "gallop away from him" and "over-roll" untidily, instead of his keeping a proper hold of its lower edge and thus allowing it to gently/smoothly roll up in the normal way and stop near the middle/top of the window.

Dear Prudence,
My sister let the front window-shade go "Wheeeeee-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup-flup!" this morning --- AGAIN! I try to not be cross with my sister, since I know that she merely forgets to grip the shade tightly enough as she releases it, allowing the shade to slip out of her small delicate hands and zip up rapidly on its own. But it still really irks me whenever I hear the "escaped" shade flapping and fluttering around, since it means that my sister then has to meekly ask me to rewind it for her (not being mechanically-inclined, she's never been able to rewind the spring very well herself); it entails my having to laboriously remove the entire messily-bunched-up-and-unfurled shade from its mounts, carefully re-roll the fabric neatly, re-tension the shade-spring, and then re-mount the roll onto its brackets again --- yuck! What should I do?
Exasperated
Dear Exasperated,
Join the club --- I fully sympathize; nobody likes to repeatedly perform a tedious task when conceivably it could be avoided fairly easily. I suggest that you either (1) add a ring-pull to the shade so that your sister can actually hook her finger through something when she operates the shade, or (2) replace the slim flat wooden stick at the bottom of the shade with a hollow lightweight plastic/aluminum tube; this added bulky thickness will prevent the end of the shade from slipping back underneath the roll and go whizzing around until the spring runs out of steam.
---Prudie, creatively

by QuacksO September 16, 2018

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