The Junk Drawer

Back in 1977 I took part in a charity walk to raise money for Multiple Sclerosis. Here I am in all my glory on the day of the event. Let’s set aside the outfit for a moment. In fact, let’s set it aside all together, because it’s hideous and scary and it makes me sad.

Seriously, stop looking at it.

OK. So prior to “The Walk,” as it was known around town, I dutifully knocked on neighbors’ doors asking for donations. I gave them my spiel that I planned to walk the entire route and asked if they’d make a pledge of some increment, say $.50 per mile. Even a pledge of $.20 a mile was something I was glad to record on my pledge sheet.

The course was a whopping 26 miles, a damn lot of miles for a 12 year old, now that I think about it. Some neighbors doubted I could finish.

I told all the nice donors that I’d come back to collect their money a day or two after I completed the walk. I would get a card punched every couple of miles to show that I’d hit all the checkpoints and they’d know how much to pay me.

I remember the walk being a blast. Motoring along with my friends and a mass of other people, it had a party feel to it. But my body really took a beating. We walked at a decent pace, didn’t kill ourselves, but considering how many miles I logged I was one sloppy mess at the finish line.

The walk route ended at a local high school. As soon as I got there, I headed straight for the ladies room for a potty break and to make an attempt to look human again.

The bathroom was jam-packed with other walkers, so there wasn’t room or time to freshen up much. I just wanted to get out, get home and take a shower.

I called my brother to come pick me up and when I got home, I made a beeline to my pledge sheet to calculate how much money I raised and to staple my punch card to it.

Reaching into my light blue, white-belted hot pants with apparently very shallow pockets, I pulled out nothing.

The card wasn’t there.

The card that showed I had slogged 26 miles in the hot sun. The card that would explain to anyone who asked why my feet had blown up to twice their size. The card I carried so far and so long and was so careful to get punched at the checkpoints.

Gone.

Fini.

I’d either dropped it after the last checkpoint, lost it somewhere in that mess of a bathroom, or anywhere else I’d been on the school grounds.

I had no way to prove to all my donors that I’d done something incredible that day. Something even I wasn’t sure I could do. No way to collect money for a good cause. Not. One. Penny.

We drove back to the high school to look for it wherever I remembered I’d been. But nothing.

I resigned myself to the fact that I was careless and stupid and an idiot. I wasn’t right for days. I decided I didn’t want to revisit the donors and try to explain with pleading eyes that “Really! I swear I walked the whole thing!”

I blame my outfit. Evil from head to toe. Really, one look at it and I should have known I’d be doomed from the start.

The economic downturn hits hard at Plymouth Yarn Company. Two different babies cost more to model sweaters than one. But it’s all good. The lad can use his earnings to pay for therapy in 20 years.

What say you? Same baby?

I read a very funny, yet scary, post over at Redhead Ranting called How Did We Survive? Jen takes a trip down memory lane, showing pictures of ways in which she and her brother should never have survived as children, given the absence of current day safety recommendations.

Check it out, if for no other reason than to see what a child’s car seat looked like in 1964. It’s simply medieval.

Her post reminded me of an at-home craft project my classmates and I were assigned in Catholic grade school.

A crucifix made out of burnt match sticks. Here is an example:

At the age of eight, we were told to take a box of thick match sticks, light them all afire and blow them out when the tips were charred just right.

Line them up neatly in the shape of a cross and glue them down.

I remember doing all of my match strikes outside, thanks to the one ounce of sense I had acquired by then.

My projects before this mostly involved gluing pebbles, elbow macaroni or cotton balls (and requisite pipe cleaners) to empty milk cartons and turning them into assorted sad-looking creations only a mother could love.

Never anything with fire. Fire kinda bad. It just occurred to me that perhaps we were supposed to get supervision. Oops.

Still, I can’t imagine any school today assigning such a project. And I can’t imagine boys being sent home with matches and told to “Go ahead, fire ‘em up!” by a teacher.

What’s sad is I heard about someone through an acquaintance whose son burned down his house because he lit a cloud of hair spray on fire in the garage. Girls would never think to light hair spray on fire.

But we would build a small bonfire if it made Jesus happy.

This post is more for my benefit than yours.

I’m taking a two-week vacation in early June. Everyone who knows it asks me where I’m going.

While I’d like to say I’m jumping on a plane to take me to some faraway place, the truth is I’m headed to a dark, dank corner of my basement.

I plan to lock myself down there for at least the first week so I can finally get my book off the ground.

No sunlight.

No fresh air.

No email.

No cats.

No husband.

No TV.

No distractions.

Just me and my laptop.

I’ve been wanting to write a book for the last couple of years and I settled on the subject matter only recently. You’ll probably all be mad at me for not telling you what it’s about, but I’m superstitious and feel that if I tell you, I’ll jinx myself.

I also feel if I announce publicly that I’m going to venture into book territory, I’d better actually DO IT.

So send me your good vibes that despite being surrounded by dusty old Christmas decorations, furniture we don’t use, kitty litter boxes and bugs falling on my head, I will still feel creative enough to knock out a few thousand words a day of decent book material.

I consider this venture the hardest thing I’ll ever do, but probably the most rewarding.

If you’ve ever tried to write a book, I’m open to advice and suggestions, but I’m scared you’ll all tell me it’s a waste of my time.

You know what?

Lie to me.

I’ve been writing The Junk Drawer for almost three years now, and if you’ve been around a while you might assume a few things about me as a humor writer.

You may think that ….

1. I was a class clown. Hardly. In fact, I was painfully shy in school and afraid of my own shadow. I never told funny jokes, never made people laugh at crazy antics and I certainly didn’t want to be the center of attention. Too much pressure and I didn’t want anyone looking at me anyway. If you need me, I’ll be over here hiding in the corner.

2. Humor writing comes easily to me. Occasionally it does, and I’m always grateful when that happens, but many times I struggle to “funny up” a piece I’m writing. I’ve buried many a post over the years. Stories I thought would be humorous wind up falling flat, I kick them to the curb and start over with something else. People often say humor writing is a skill “you either have or you don’t,” but I say it’s a matter of degree, it takes work and the perfect piece doesn’t just write itself. Also, I don’t know what a perfect piece is. I’ve never had one.

3. I’m hilarious in-person. The fact is I don’t consider myself very funny in-person. I do better with the written word. My husband is the funny one, the expert joke-teller, the life of the party. I am a wallflower, content with soaking in my surroundings and watching other people be interesting and funny. I am not a laugh factory.

4. I always look at the lighter side of things. True, I do like to find humor in everyday things, but I’m a serious person by nature. Some might even say too serious, especially at work, where I’m laser-focused on the tasks at hand. But that’s because I have a solid work ethic, thanks to my parents. I’m a worrywart, stress a little too easily and can spend half a day stewing over something innocuous. Finding the lighter side means I first have to blast all the negativity out of my head. I admire people who ooze sunshine despite their burdens.

5. I gravitate to humor and comedy in books and movies. The majority of books I own are non-fiction and decidedly unfunny. Some examples are Salt: A World History, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nary a chuckle in them. I will always pick a documentary over a comedy. At the top of my list is WordPlay, a film about the spellbinding world of crossword puzzles and the eggheads who love them. Riveting!

Put together, these personality traits probably shouldn’t have led me to write humor. But somehow I plopped myself down into this genre and got comfortable. Isn’t it funny how that works?

We have a winner! Stephanie Barr guessed yesterday’s What’s That item correctly, though not by its official name. She described it thusly:

“Looks to me like the receptacle for a fastener, like a snap or a rivet, where you pound the fastener in and it’s deformed by this receptacle into the right shape.”

For the record, the object is called a dapping block.

The item belongs to a friend of mine who makes handwrought sterling silver jewelry. She says “Each side of the steel block has a different size indentation.  Metal is placed on top and another tool is hammered into it.”

Here are some pictures showing the object in its entirety, along with the other tool that is used with it.

Thanks for playing this week’s What’s That! I expect to have another one next week, so keep your eyes peeled.

Congratulations, Stephanie! I’ll contact you shortly about your prizes.

Today’s What’s That item comes with not one, but two, hints! I’m so generous.

Hint #1: It doesn’t belong to me.

Hint #2: It is always used with a second object not pictured here.

There. Wasn’t that super helpful?

How to play:

1. The photo shows a small portion of a larger object.

2. First person to guess the object wins a Junk Drawer magnet and your choice from a fine selection of novelty bandages. Nine out of ten clown doctors say that novelty bandages work better than regular ones.

OK, so here goes. What is this?

And now for that FYI:

I’m leaving Entrecard in a few days. If that’s how you usually visit The Junk Drawer, please consider bookmarking me or subscribing to the feed. I’d love to keep you as a regular visitor.

You can always find me over at Tribal Blogs and on Facebook, too! Stick with me, will ya?

————-

CONTEST CLOSED! We have a winner!

Today a laptop was delivered to me for virus/malware removal. Before I got started on my work, I wanted to clean the laptop because the screen was kind of funky and so was the keyboard.

I spritzed a little cleaner on a cloth and wiped down the screen and then went all crazy on the keyboard.

A little too crazy.

With one quick swipe, the CAPS LOCK key went sailing.

Cray-ap!!!

Keys on regular USB keyboards are pretty easy to snap back on, but laptops are a different animal.

Why?

Because this is what the the underbelly of a laptop key looks like.

Ridiculous, huh?

I tried everything.

I Googled how to replace keys on the make and model of this particular laptop. I did find one link, with pictures and everything, but this key mechanism looked nothing like the pictures.

And so I sat there for half an hour studying it, trying eighteen ways to get it to clamp down.

I figured that the two thin metal pins went through the holes on the left and right sides, as shown above. That much seemed straightforward.

But that white thing above it that looks like a tiny toilet seat needed to hook over a very small metal anchor on the side closest to me. But no amount of fiddling or carefully applied pressure would get it to snap on!

I enlisted the help of my co-workers who tried for a few minutes, but quickly gave up.

“You’re screwed. Can’t be fixed.”

Just then, a hardware tech happened into my office and so I showed it to him.

“Oh, that’s messed up,” he says. “Better have Keith (another tech) work on it. He’s great at fixing these things. Better yet, just give me the serial number and I’ll get a new keyboard from Dell and come back to put it on.”

I didn’t exactly want to do that because my client was really short on time this week and I doubted he’d have time allow more work on it.

So I emailed Keith and sent him the picture.

“Is there any way I can fix this myself?” I asked.

“Oh, man. Those are nasty. But if you bring the laptop down, I’ll try to fix it,” he said.

I really wanted to fix the key myself, especially because I’d broken it and felt like a royal doofus. I also since found out that the laptop wasn’t under warranty anymore, so getting a new keyboard would cost money. Money spent that would be my fault.

I finally gave up the fight and called the client. I left voice mail that I’d cleaned the malware off the laptop and also cleaned the keyboard, which resulted in the loss of the CAPS LOCK key. And then I begged for forgiveness and told him that we’d have to deliver the system to the shop for repair and that I was sorry for the inconvenience.

My apologies took up the entire 3-minute voice mail limit before I was unceremoniously cut off.

About ten minutes later the client showed up.

Laughing.

“Kathy, that key has been broken for years.”

And right then and there, my head exploded all over the wall. I gathered up my brain and pieced it back together much better than I was able to reassemble the CAPS LOCK key.

And that was my Monday.

How was yours?

I took these pictures in July, 2008 to submit to a fun blog called Ugly Mailbox.

Thought I’d share it here, too, since there’s so much going on at this house.

I remember being scared that the owner would come out and shoo(t) me away with a rifle in hand.

Discuss.

I hate instructions manuals. I pity the people who write them because nobody reads them.

But I deserve an “I told you so” for what I just did.

See the yellow part of my Dyson vacuum cleaner cylinder?

That’s what I somehow untwisted the first time I cleaned it out. It was real easy. I took the lid off and dumped the dirt out from the top.

But this time I couldn’t get it to do that.

Instead, I groped around for other buttons and found the latch that, unbeknownst to me, opens the bottom of the tube.

A weeks’ worth of dirt, kitty litter and hair came rushing out and landed at my feet. Smooth move, ExLax.

But Lorraine was happy to help me clean up my mistake. That’s right. I named my vacuum cleaner Lorraine. What about it?

I know someone who named his lawn mower.

So there.

Sometimes luck taps me on the shoulder, introduces itself and shakes my hand.

Luck paid me a visit in 2004 and sent me to Paris.

I was sitting at my desk at work, fighting an urge to raid the snack machine downstairs. The urge won and so I grabbed my wallet and headed out the door.

On my way downstairs, I spotted a fraternity student sitting at a table by the elevator, selling raffle tickets for a charity fundraiser.

The sign on the table read “Win a Trip to Paris!”

Curious, I walked over to the table to get more information.

“Tickets are $5 each,” the student said.

Digging through my wallet, I was disappointed to find that I had only a few singles and change I planned to use in the snack machine.

“Will you be around later this week?” I asked.

“Yep, til Friday,” he said.

“Good.” I told him I’d be back later with enough cash in hand for two tickets.

The next day I found the student, paid him $10, filled out a form and received my tickets. A note on the back said the winner would be announced a few weeks after that, and it included a URL with more raffle information. I stuck the tickets in my wallet.

Weeks went by.

And nothing. No phone call to say I had won. Oh, well, better luck next time, I thought.

But then I remembered the tickets in my wallet and thought maybe the winner would be announced on the web site for the contest.

Maybe someone I know won. That’d be nice for them.

And so I pointed my browser to the web site, which revealed an animated image of the French flag.

The caption read “Click here to see who won!”

I clicked on the flag.

The French national anthem began playing over my speakers and the image dissolved gradually to reveal this:

I immediately felt a rush of adrenalin and almost started crying. It was me!!! At least I thought it was me. Feeling like a game show contestant who’d just won a car, I thought for a moment maybe I wasn’t really staring at my own name on the screen.

Winning big things makes you take leave of every last one of your senses.

So I did what crazy game show contestants do. I got up and, arms flailing, ran over to a woman who worked outside my office. “Nancy!!!! Go to this web site!!!! Does it say Kathy Frederick on your screen too?!?!?”

I swear to God I did that and you can ask Nancy. Just don’t ask her how stupid she thought I was at that very moment. She’s such a nice lady, she wouldn’t be honest with you anyway.

There we were, looking at my name and listening to La Marseillaise, letting it all sink in.

Wow. A trip to Paris for ten bucks. You just can’t beat that.

I called my husband and didn’t even say hello when he answered. I simply shouted “Pack your bags! We’re going to Paris!”

He let an expletive slip and we hooted and hollered for a good five minutes, not believing my good fortune.

I contacted the student organization who sold me the tickets and they apologized for not notifying me by phone earlier. They confirmed my prize, told me to contact travel services to make arrangements and the rest is history.

It was the trip of a lifetime.

And all because luck pulled up a chair and gave me a fine How d’ya do?