The Junk Drawer

It’s official. I’m going to hell.

You may notice a new graphic in my sidebar for the BlogHer network. On approach for The Junk Drawer’s first birthday, I’ve considered ways to earn some cash to offset the costs associated with blogging.

I was recently accepted by BlogHer, and with it comes an opportunity to make some money on the side.

Don’t think for a second that I didn’t stress over this decision, especially because I have said publicly I would never put ads on this blog. That’s right. Never put ads on this blog.

During the last few months, I’ve been having a conversation with two opposing people in my head: Conflicted Me, who hates to go back on her word, and Sensible Me, who would like to earn enough money from blogging to buy a pizza and a beer every now and then.

Here’s how things went in my head:

Conflicted Me: So you said you’d never put ads on the blog. You’re a big, stinking liar. What gives?

Sensible Me: Yeah, I said it. What I never wanted were ads that leapt off the page in the middle of posts and annoyed people.

Conflicted Me: But you did it anyway.

Sensible Me: Well, not exactly. The BlogHer folks give you ads to put up over on the side that don’t scream at you. The ads come from well-known companies that I can get behind. It was really Google AdSense ads I didn’t want on my blog. I worried I’d get ads for Preparation H for all the times I discuss my butt.

Conflicted Me: But you always thought your blog would be purer if you kept ads off it.

Sensible Me: I did, but then I considered how much time I put into writing stories that entertain others.

Conflicted Me: You think this is entertaining?

Sensible Me: Shut up.

Conflicted Me: You once said your day job pays the bills, but blogging makes you rich. Did you really mean rich, as in a millionaire?

Sensible Me: No, stupid. I meant that it gave me an outlet to write for the masses. To hopefully give others something to chuckle about for five minutes during the day. It’s my passion.

Conflicted Me: But that didn’t mean you had to get paid for it, did it?

Sensible Me: No, but it started sounding like a viable option when Dave put it to me this way: “If you got your book published, you’d expect to be paid, right? So why are you giving away book material, one page at a time, for free?”

Conflicted Me: You think this stuff is book quality?

Sensible Me: Listen, jerk. I never said this was book quality or that I could ever actually publish a book. But it seems to me if I’m putting as much effort into the blog as I’d put into a book, then maybe it’s not a half-bad idea to get a little spare change along the way.

Conflicted Me: I bother you, don’t I?

Sensible Me: Yes, you do. Now could you get out of my head and let me be?

Conflicted Me: Sure, but have you thought about how your readers will feel about ads on your blog? Aren’t you worried they’ll go find someone else to read?

Sensible Me: Yes, but I’m willing to take the risk that maybe, just maybe, they could see the ads as an indirect way to put some dough in my pocket, and they’ll still feel enriched by reading something I wrote.

Conflicted Me: You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you?

Sensible Me: I’ve had about enough of you.

Conflicted Me: OK, but don’t come crying to me when all your readers leave and all you’ll have to celebrate your blog’s birthday is a cake and party hats with no one to pass them out to.

Sensible Me: Bite me. And you’re not invited! So there!

Conflicted Me: Suit yourself. I’m leaving. But we still have to discuss that $1 jar of mayo you forgot to pay for at the store last week. That’ll keep us up at night and you know it.

Note: While I did say yes to ads on my blog, I do have a little template tweaking to do. I plan to have two sidebars on the right, instead of just one so that the ads and other things can run on the right, while my other graphics will appear as before on the left.

And don’t worry. My face will stay right where it is. I know that’s the real reason you all come here.

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These are trying times. Kathy has no words. A whopping ten drafts in her queue and nothing worthy of posting.

I think if I don’t post something today, nothing will ever get posted again, the Junk Drawer will close shop and you guys will loiter outside wondering what the hell happened.

I have to get something on the page to kick start me out of this funk I’m in.

Come back in a couple days if this post bores you to tears. I’m about to tell you about my weekend:

1. I fell asleep on the couch at 5PM yesterday and awoke at 8PM thinking it was the next day already. I slept hard. I even had full, movie-length dreams. In one of them, I was standing in a reception line at a political function, holding hands with Henry Kissinger. Discuss.

2. I worked all day Saturday, brought a lunch, but ate it before 10AM. So the rest of the day I took from the other junk drawer in my life and gave myself a headache, a stomachache and left work on such a sugar high I don’t remember how I got home.

3. My husband cleaned the bathrooms, God bless him, but broke the toilet seat off one of the toilets. How is this possible? Broke an entire toilet seat off its hinges? Men, if you’re going to help clean the house, don’t do it in the manner you would, say, play football. Cleaning a toilet needn’t be a race nor a destructive act. It just needs to be wiped down — gently.

4. In the process of preparing to send DrowseyMonkey her prize magnet for having the fattest head, I got sidetracked researching whether I can mail it with U.S. postage or if I have to take it to the post office to get international postage put on it. I tried Googling for the answer to this simple question, but could not find a satisfactory one. I’m too embarrassed to ask Drowsey, so I’ll just head to the post office tomorrow where I’m sure a clerk there will tell me what a moron I am.

5. I didn’t have the energy to fix something that’s been bugging me for a month. Our wall clock is stuck at 4 o’clock. We don’t know why because the batteries are fine. The pendulum below the clock face continues to swing to and fro. I meant to check on why it’s malfunctioning, but now I’m getting really used to it being 4 o’clock all the time. Four happens to be my favorite number, so I’m keeping it.

6. Since I took such a long nap yesterday, I couldn’t get to sleep until midnight last night. But my body always, always gets up between 4AM-5AM, which means I’m running on fumes right now. I’m sorry. This is the kind of post you get on fumes.

Forgive me for having to post such lame material, but this was the prescription for funkitis and it had to be done. Pray I’m funkless tomorrow.

Night.

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Back in November, I laughed through a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Cardiogirl. She wrote about her experience working in a fast-food restaurant as a teenager and how she had to wear a hat as part of her uniform.

Only one problem. She says, “I hate wearing hats. I do not have a hat face. I do not have a hat head. I don’t look good in hats and I will gladly let my ears succumb to frostbite in the midst of winter.”

I dropped her a comment that I didn’t have a hat head either, which made wearing a ridiculous cowboy hat as part of my restaurant uniform all the more humiliating.

I told her about my goofy hat and vowed to search high and low for the one picture in existence showing me in the uniform, complete with hat, in all its splendor.

Cardiogirl, this one’s for you!

Big Fat Head, Circa 1982

Here’s the thing about the hat and my big, fat head. This hat was issued to me on the day of my orientation. The manager pulled out a few hats for me to try on and none of them fit. None of the women’s hats fit. God bless her, she was so nice to me.

Kathy, it doesn’t seem that any of these fit. Let’s try some others.

She went over to men’s uniform boxes and pulled out a gigundo hat that would fit only me and Charlie Brown.

Here, try this one.

Practically sobbing, I tried on the hat and it fit. Sorta. I knew in my heart I could probably have worn an even larger one, but I decided to make do with the one I was given. There was no way I was going to try on anything larger or I’d have to quit the job I hadn’t even started yet.

But here’s the confusing thing. You know damn well that when I sat down to write this, I had to measure my head to know once and for all how fat it is.

It’s not!

According to several sources, the average circumference of a woman’s head is 22.5 inches. Mine is slightly over average, at 23 inches. I have to say I was really surprised. Only two things could explain why I had to wear a men’s hat as a teen. One, my head was larger in 1982 and shrank since then, or two, my head is so seriously misshapen that it just won’t wear a hat very well. I’m going with #2.

Now here’s a little contest for you: If anyone — family members excluded — can name the restaurant I worked at based on the above picture, I’ll send you a Junk Drawer magnet. It might be tough because I believe the restaurant went out of business sometime in the mid-90s and may have been located only on the East Coast, United States.

Let’s make it two contests! Women only. Go measure your head and whoever has the fattest head gets a prize, too. Of course, you may not want to admit your achievement, but if nothing else, you’ll have my sympathies. No lying just to get a magnet. I have it on good authority they’re becoming collector’s items.

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Just when you thought you knew everything about me, I give you Kathy by the Numbers. Don’t worry, there’s no math involved and you won’t be quizzed at the end!

Position in birth order: 5

Number of years it took me to get my bachelor’s degree: 12

Courses I took in my last year: 12

Number of gray hairs that earned me: 2, 539

How many years I’ve been with my current employer: 23

Number of different jobs I’ve held in that time: 5

Cups of coffee I drink per day: 3

Number of times per week I forget a reheated cup in the microwave: 2

Years married: 15

Years together: 23

Number of houses or apartments I’ve lived in: 7

Greatest number of hot dogs I’ve eaten in one sitting: 6

Times I’ve ridden on a motorcycle: 1

Prayers I said while doing it: 47

Number of pets I had as a child: 1

Years my parents have been married: 62

Percent of married couples who make it this long in the U.S.: <5 

Miles I drive to work: 8

Months I’ve been blogging: 11

Letters in my maiden name: 12

Weeks it took to learn to write it as a kindergartner without a visual aid: 4

Number of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’ve eaten: 0

Miles to nearest airport: 3

Number of planes that fly directly over my house per day: 75

Invention ideas I had that I never acted on: 2

Number of them I saw go to market without me: 1

Years I was a cheerleader: 2

Number of keys on my keychain: 9

Times I’ve won the lottery or a raffle: 4

Number of times a trip to Paris was the prize: 1

Magnets on my refrigerator: 11

Number of picture frames on display in my house with the picture that came with it still in the frame: 1

Height in inches: 64

Weight in pounds: Get serious

Books I’d finish per month before blogging: 2

Books I finish now: 0

Hours of sleep I get per night: 6.5

Naps I take on the weekend: 2

Number of times I got my head stuck in a fence: 1

Average number of times my family reminds me of this per year: 4

Number of times I’ve skied: 1

People I knocked down in the process: 2

Number of nieces I have: 2

Years they are apart in age: 25

Traffic tickets I’ve received: 3

Number I talked myself out of: 1

Times I’ve tried ending this list: 3

Shut up already!

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I had a massive brain fart yesterday. I completely and totally forgot my blog password. In my defense, it’s the most awesome password in the history of complex, deadbolt, Fort Knox passwords.

It’s a beautiful thing, my password. Piece of art, actually.

It has a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers, special characters and at no point among the 13 characters exists any word in any language. It took me days to be able to enter it without thinking.

The problem with my password is that I only know the whole thing if I can get going on the first character. And that was my problem yesterday. I failed on take-off.

I couldn’t remember if the first letter was capitalized or not. Then I got all messed up on the following two because I wasn’t sure of the first. By the fifth character, I was way off the tracks and I knew it.

Come on, Kathy. You can do this.

Start over. Stop sweating. Think. But don’t over-think! Look at the keyboard. Don’t look at the keyboard! Find your center. Ooom, ooom.

It took me almost a minute to get it right. In password-remembering time, that’s an eternity. It bothered me a lot that I struggled. Why did I suddenly forget it after months of using it without a problem?

Maybe it means it’s time to change it to something like, oh I don’t know… password? What was I thinking using one so difficult at my age? Everyone knows the brain can only hold so much information. Critical stuff like word-for-word dialogue from every Brady Bunch episode, my high school locker combination, and the name of the girl in 4th grade who called me fat once.

That’s it. This brain’s full. I need a new one.

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Cleaning out a drawer today, I came across an interesting combination of Christmas pictures taken of me, my sister Ann, and my brother Michael.

When I held them side by side, I noticed something about us had changed between 1971 and 1973:

Christmas, 1971: Michael with good eyes, Ann with good eyes, Kathy with good eyes

New Year’s Day, 1973: Sometime in 1972 we all went blind.

I’ll leave you to pick apart these pictures. Ask anything you want. Let’s start with Ann’s pants.

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On May 21 I posted this picture I took at a defunct gas station in my area, showing a ridiculously low price for gasoline. Someone in my area wrote to the local newspaper and asked why it’s still there and if any information could be found about the station’s owner.

Since many of you asked about the sign, I thought I’d fill you in.

Click here for the story.

It seems the owner is a fugitive from the law, trying to avoid “10 counts of issuing bad checks, two counts of theft by deception, and related charges.”

I guess taking down the old sign is last on his list of priorities. It’s estimated the station closed down in the spring of 2002. So that’s the last time we saw $1.29/gallon gas. And it can be safely said we’ll never see it again. 

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I’m not a huge fan of the blog meme, but this one I liked. I stole it from my pal Ferd, who stole it from someone else. We’re all thieves, really. But in a good way.

The Mosaic Picture Meme

Originally from Bud who changed the rules slightly.

The Concept:

This Meme is all about the Mosaic Collage that you are about to build by answering the questions in this meme by using pictures! First what we changed: The meme we stole required the use of programs that you needed to register to use. So it was tied to you downloading two programs (and learning them…) Here we do the same meme, the exact same way, but leave you to your own resources. We also simplified the rules to allow a bit more creative (and speed!). So here we go:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Google Image Search or same type of search engine for pictures.

2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image. You can’t search forever for a certain image.

3. Copy and paste each in any program that you can post the pictures in a mosaic pattern. You can post them 3 X 4 or 4 X 3. We used Microsoft Paint below.

The questions:

1. What is your first name?… Kathy

2. What is your favorite food?… BLT. The more B, the better.

3. What high school did you go to?… Notre Dame, Green Pond, Bethlehem, PA. It’s where I encountered a new set of horrors after the ones I suffered in grade school.

4. What is your favorite color? … Maroon

5. Who is your celebrity crush?… Will Lyman, television and stage actor, and also the voice of PBS’ Frontline. I’m in love with his smooth, sultry voice. My husband is not allowed to talk when Will is speaking. He may use sign language in an emergency, say, if our house is burning down. But he may not talk to me.

6. What is your favorite drink?… Apple juice. I drink water almost exclusively, but when I splurge, it’s apple juice. What a flavor blast!

7. What is your dream vacation?… Without reservation, Paris, France. Our trip there in 2004 ruined us for any other vacation we’ve taken. Nothing else compares.

8. What is your favorite dessert?… Magic Cookie Bars. I make these for student assistants I hire to help on our team at work. One student ate a whole batch himself and asked if I put crack in them. Beware. They’re addictive.

9. What do you want to be when you grow up?… A writer.

10. What do you love most in life?… My husband, Dave. And, as you might guess, he’s a saint for putting up with me all these years.

11. What is one word that describes you?… Peculiar, but you knew that already.

12. What is your blog name?… The Junk Drawer

So there you have it! I’m not inclined to thrust a meme on others, so feel free to tag yourself if you’re interested.

UPDATE: Because the images used in my mosaic were taken from Google Images, I should properly credit the sources. In order from left to right:

Kathy, BLT, Maroon, Junk Drawer, Notre Dame Green Pond, Will Lyman, Apple Juice,  Paris, Magic Cookie Bars, Writer, Peculiar, My Husband Dave

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My dear niece, Amy * recently had surgery to remove a growth on her pituitary gland. The pituitary gland is located at the base of the brain, which I thought was at the back of the head, just above the neck.

That’s not where it is. Here’s where it is:

Actual Amy brain, with growth

You might wonder how a surgeon reaches this part of the brain. Well, they don’t saw your skull open and pull unwelcome pieces out through a hole. They actually take a trip through your nose and do all the work from the front of your face.

The surgeon was very blunt about how she’d feel after surgery: “You’ll feel like someone punched you very, very hard.”

Amy’s surgery went extremely well and she’s home resting for three weeks, complete with colorful bruises from the medically-sanctioned beating she got. Along with some lovely pharmaceuticals, she was given a list of restrictions she must adhere to for a whole month.

The one restriction driving her batshit is that she cannot blow her nose, not even once. FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH.

Think about it.

I blew my nose twenty times since she had her surgery and every time I stopped to think “What if I couldn’t do that just now?” It pains me to think that no matter how desperately she needs to blow, she can only let it drain.

I try my blessed best not to blow my nose in solidarity to her predicament, but I just cannot NOT blow my nose. She’s not handling the restriction well at all, as you might imagine. She continues to wear gauze taped above her lip as a reminder that she can’t touch her nose, blow her nose, or God forbid, pick it.

Here’s my plea: Would you guys please think of Amy the next time you blow your honker? Say a little prayer next time you use a tissue? The girl needs some help getting through the next three weeks.

We’re just counting down the days for her. On Thursday, June 26th, that noise you hear will be Amy letting loose for a month’s worth of plugged up nostrils. After that, we’ll all breathe a little easier.

Thanks, guys.

* This post was pre-approved by Amy’s brain.

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Today’s post covers a series of topics that don’t qualify for posts of their own. Kind of a mish-mash of things that don’t have anywhere else to go. You know, like stuff you throw in a junk drawer. Fitting, eh?

HUMOR-BLOGS.COM ROCKS

I’ve been a member of Humor-Blogs.com since I started this blog and have been ranked in the Top 20 blogs (out of 940 blogs) for the last six months or so. If you’re a humor blogger, I highly recommend joining up. Not only will you see increased traffic, you’ll find other great humor blogs to get to know and love.

I’d like to publicly thank Diesel, who started the Humor-Blogs site, for giving me a place to showcase The Junk Drawer. I don’t know where I’d be without it.

And for a bit of shameless self-promotion, you may not know that clicking the green Humor-Blogs button in my sidebar earns me referral credits that keep me in the Top 20.

If you want to check out other humor sites, click through to Humor-Blogs that way, and you’ll be doing your part to help me achieve fame and fortune. Well, not the fortune part. I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

WHAT’S THIS ENTRECARD THING?

You might have noticed the “Today’s Featured Blog” widget in my sidebar. These sites come from Entrecard, a service that gives bloggers a way to promote themselves by “dropping” their cards on sites as they browse other blogs.

You earn credits for dropping your card and having cards dropped on yours, as well as through other bloggers advertising on your site. Then you use your own credits to buy spots on other blogs.

In the month since I joined, I’ve seen a twofold increase in my daily visitors. Some people pooh-pooh Entrecard because it takes time to drop cards while visiting other sites. But I’ve found it to be a worthwhile effort so far. My stats program tells me that about 10% of droppers stay longer than five minutes on my site, and some also subscribe to my feed.

If you use Entrecard, try not to “drop and run.” Spend time on the blogs you visit, and most importantly, comment on the blogs you really like. In my opinion, commenting on other people’s blogs is the best way to gain traffic in the long run. If you use Entrecard, drop a comment in the drawer and share your experience with it.

YES, THE BAG IS STILL IN THE TREE

Just a quick update: The plastic bag is still stuck in the tree outside my building at work. You may have noticed the Plastic Bag Tracker displayed in my sidebar, updated daily. There it will sit until the bag falls out of the tree, or Jeff comes to take it out his damn self (I know it’s driving him insane that it’s still there).

I’LL HATE MYSELF IN THE MORNING

It kills me to beg, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m currently running a Top Spots widget in my sidebar, where bloggers can buy a spot in the list for $3 to showcase a link to their sites. Consider it my tip jar.

Right now, the list is full, but I would appreciate if a few more bloggers would buy a spot — and here’s the begging part — so that I can reach the payment threshold. Because Top Spots won’t pay out until $25 is reached, and I’m stuck at the $23 mark, I haven’t seen one red cent from running the widget.

To encourage new Top Spotters, I’ll drop the cost down to $2. A link to your site will appear on the list for one month, after which I’ll remove the widget and collect my 25 bucks. Thanks to those who’ve bought a spot and to those who will consider buying one now. I’m not sure how much traffic the people currently in the list have seen, but I hope it’s been enough to consider your $3 investment worthwhile!

That’s it for today’s mish-mash post. Have a great weekend everybody!

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Some days I think I could be a vegetarian.

But here’s the thing. I loves me a good burger. What makes it easy to eat meat is that it doesn’t still look like the body part it came from, unless I’m eating Thanksgiving turkey, and then I try to ignore that it’s missing its head.

The most disgusting thing I’ve eaten that still looked like where it came from was this:

Italian tripe

Beef tripe is usually made from the first three stomachs of a cow, the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), the reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), and the omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe).

I ate the reticulum. Sounds kinda like “rectum,” doesn’t it? 

I found myself presented with a plate full of the above “I’ll be throwing this up later” delicacy once when my high school boyfriend took me to dinner at his grandmother’s.

His was an old world Italian family where dinners were hours-long events to be taken very seriously. If something was served to you, no matter how revolting it looked, you respectfully ate it, smiled, and asked for more.

If I recall correctly, the vomit-inducing tripe was served to me in a soup. When I took my first helping, I was appalled. Each honeycomb sheet looked like bubble wrap after the bubbles were popped. It was pale in color and resembled something you might peel of your shoes if you should happen to walk through a garbage dump.

I couldn’t imagine eating this mess, but I really had no choice. A lot of love went into making this meal and I’m not sure I would have been allowed to leave if I didn’t at least try it.

And so I did.

I don’t remember the swallowing part; I only remember the chewing. I could have saved myself a lot of time and trauma if I’d swallowed the pieces whole because it took ten minutes to chew through the stuff. Essentially, I ate a bowl of rubber bands.

One by one, the sheets went down. Imagining I was eating food instead of an office supply, I slowly worked my way to the bottom of the bowl. I was careful to pace myself so that I didn’t finish too quickly, as that would only invite the question “Kathy, would you like some more?” Oh, no. Please, God. No.

To this day, I can’t believe I ate what I ate and have only the occasional nightmare about it. Give me another part of the cow — any other part — and I’m fine. Impossible-to-chew, sheets of skin-like stomach matter? No, thanks. I think I’ll pass.

So, what’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten?

——

It’s chow time over at Humor-Blogs.

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