One day, though, when I had a few minutes to spare and was wondering what useful thing I should do during that short time (and afraid I would think of something pressing enough to get me out of the chair where I was lolling) I decided to make a "for rent" sign for the radio. I printed the words neatly on a piece of white cardboard and stood it up against the radio. Within a few days I was beginning to think that magazine editors who pay ten cents a word for manuscripts were cheapskates. Those two words I had written began to bring in fifty-cent piece after fifty-cent piece, until at last the radio had paid for itself over and over again. We discussed getting a few more radios, but that, too, was easy to put off. Occasionally one of the many motel-to-motel salesmen with whom we were blessed would want to install in our cabins, at no expense to us, coin-operated radios, from which we were to have a percentage of the take. I felt that such radios in the cabins would put our motel on too obviously commercial a basis, while Grant was beginning to toy with the idea of putting ordinary little radios in each cabin for the free use of our customers, as a deluxe touch to the accommodations. Unaccustomed to such luxurious details as free radios, many of the people who occupied the cabins would be sure to choose our motel in preference to any other if they ever went through Banning again. However, putting a thirty dollar radio in each of thirteen units would cost nearly four hundred dollars--a large sum to pay for the good will of customers who already seemed pleased with our motel. We filed both that idea, and the idea of letting a salesman install coin-operated radios, away in our minds for future reference. Grant, after working on the children's bedroom so long that I had really given up any idea that it would ever be completed, finally finished it. The walls and ceiling were covered with cedar siding, the floor with linoleum of a swirling green color, and we hung crisp white curtains at the windows. I put one of the motel spreads, a green one, on David's bed. I had converted into draperies a matching green spread which had been burned by a smoker-in-bed, and these I hung over the closet doorway and in front of a big cabinet of shelves Grant had made. After I had cut away the burned parts and made the draperies, there were still several fairly good-sized pieces of the material left, and of these I made scarves for the two small chests in the room. (From remaining scraps I made little curtains for the window of the door between the office and the living room--curtains that would be easy for me to move slightly in order to peek into the office to see what might be going on there.) The total effect was very pleasing. The room looked a lot different than the ugly garage into which we had put the children's beds the day we arrived.