The Junk Drawer

Honey, can you roll a little to the right?

Uh. No. Can you?

Nope. My cheek fell asleep again and I can’t roll.

How many times have I asked you not to call me honey? We dated as seedlings for like, what? Two weeks? It’s over and you know it. I still can’t believe you found me again. And now look at us.

Oh, honey, it’s not as bad as it seems.

Is too. And quit it with the honey.

Well, I’m not sorry about it. Why do you always have to find the negative?

Look, the patch has rules. One pumpkin every ten square inches. You just had to roll over near me, didn’t you?

I was cold.

Too bad. You knew we’d bake in the sun during the day and get chilly at night. Those are the rules.

I thought they were going to give us blankets. Besides, I like us as a couple. It makes us unique.

It makes us stupid. And stop saying we’re a couple. We’re not. And you’ve ruined it for me. We’re supposed to be two pumpkins with two stems. We have exactly one between us. We can’t even sit right! Who wants a pumpkin that can’t even sit right?

Well, I quite like it.

You would. This isn’t normal. I want to be normal.

Normal is overrated. And what’s all this about rules? Why do you always have to follow the rules? Maybe if you weren’t such a tight ass, we’d still be together.

Maybe if you weren’t so clingy, I’d have given us a chance.

Why all the hostility? I can guarantee you someone will buy us because they like us as a pair. And, admit it, you still like me.

If you think someone’s going to buy a defective set of pumpkins for Halloween, you’re out of your gourd.

Aw, you made a funny. See? You look all cranky, you act all cranky, but you made a funny anyway. Is that a smile I see? Are you smiling?

No, that’s a frown. If I wasn’t contorted like this, you’d know that.

Aw, I choose to think it was a smile. Now let’s make up. How ’bout a kiss?

We’re already kissing.

Hee. My plan worked then.

Hey, peeps! I’m home from a business conference I attended in Norfolk, Virginia. Oh, sweet blog, how I’ve missed you!

Here are some random observations I collected along the way:

1. A garden shed with a crucifix slapped over the door and a hand-painted sign counts as a church in the south.

2. I almost threw my back out unloading pillows from my bed every night. It is possible to have too much comfort and too much poof.

3. If the conference staff puts out chafing dishes every day full of delicious bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and buttery biscuits, and you get accustomed to it, when they start putting out stuff like this…..

this is how much of it you will take.

4. Apparently, the Tyson plant somewhere in Virginia has a Chicken of the Month award for birds on good behavior. We saw a gaggle of them feeding outside the factory on the front lawn.

If death row chickens knew how to fly at a decent clip, they could, you know, leave.

5. The south doesn’t breed tail-gaters or speeders, and everyone politely lets you into a lane when you need to get there. Unlike in the north, where drivers will sooner shoot out your tires than show you the least bit of courtesy. North, take a lesson.

6. After going insane being on the road for eight hours, when your driving companion leaves your neighborhood to return the rental car, and you follow behind, you will  laugh so hard you cry when you see her make the first turn the wrong way and wind up in the suburban abyss for an extra ten minutes it kept her from getting the hell home already.

7. Having a panic attack while riding on a leisure yacht going only 2 knots per hour will get you laughed at by total strangers.

8. Having a conference badge hanging around your neck and swinging off your boobs will get you unintentionally ogled by total strangers trying to read your name and university, printed in teeny tiny typeface.

9. Four cups of coffee in the hotel room the morning of the drive home, plus four more during conference events and one more on the way home is sort of too much. It also gives you the crazy eyes, an unforgiving bladder and lead foot.

10. Coastal cities rock it with the seafood. And so do seafood restaurants.

11. That guy who was stuck to my trunk on Philadelphia’s I-95, in the rain and on a shoulderless stretch, can go to hell. You proved that I had every reason to fear driving on that highway and ruined any chance of me ever attempting it again.

12. Southern hospitality is alive and well. When your fat ass knocks over a dozen formerly organized pashmina scarves from a display in a gift shop — not once, but twice — the cashier will apologize to you for the incidents. You will feel like a dumb northerner and pray she doesn’t have a blog of her own.

I’m glad to be back! Missed you guys!

I like cheese. A lot. When I find a cheese I love, I pretty much stick to it until I can’t get it anymore.

My husband Dave went to the store the other night and I asked him to get my favorite cheese. He asked me what it was called.

“I don’t know. All I know is what the package looks like. Take my cell phone and call me from the cheese section and I’ll walk you through.”

He gets to the store and calls me as instructed from the wall of cheese.

I tell him “OK. Are you at the display that faces the donuts?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Now the cheese I want is a sharp cheddar, in a rectangular block and comes in an opaque wrapper and has a red or burgundy label.”

“I’m looking and it’s not here.”

“Look on the right side, maybe the second shelf from the top. Maybe the middle-ish shelf.”

“It’s not here. Orange?”

“No. Not an orange label. Red!”

“No. I mean orange cheese. Orange cheddar?”

“No! It’s a white cheddar with a red label. Keep looking.”

“It’s not here. I’m looking at all the cheeses now.”

“Well, it’s gotta be there. They never run out. There’s always like a dozen of them. It has to be there.”

“It’s not here, I swear. I’m done. I’m leaving the cheese.”

Now I’m sad and mad and cheeseless. I decide to go to the store myself the next night to find my cheese. I even bring my camera so I can take a picture of the cheese for future cheese reference.

I get there and see that the store people moved all the cheese over to the other side of the display, the side facing the deli. And they moved all the meats to the side where the cheese is supposed to be by the donuts. Why?

To make matters worse, my favorite cheese is not there. Who moved my cheese?!

I get home and immediately scream at Dave for not telling me that the cheese has moved to the other side of the display and if he’d only told me that the cheese was on the side facing the deli, where it never was before, then I could have told him that they moved the cheese and I would have known something was amiss and I would have halted the looking-for-the-cheese expedition the other night!!! And now I find out they DON’T EVEN HAVE IT!!!!

And then I took a breath, stopped spitting fire balls, my eyes returned to their normal size and all the angry snakes retreated back into my Medusa head.

The look on his face. Abject fear. Like he realized at that very moment what a beast of a woman he married and is it too late to get out now?

I’m sorry about the cheese, dear. I just like it a lot. You hereby have adequate grounds for divorce.

I had an email exchange with some friends of mine today. In it, I mentioned that I have never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Not even a nibble. I just can’t do it.

In the same conversation, I mentioned that burping is among the other things I can’t do.

I don’t mean that I can’t burp at will. I mean that I can’t burp at all. It’s an affliction I’ve had as long as I can remember, but my mother assures me that I did, in fact, burp as a baby.

All around me, people are burping. They burp on command. They burp after a big meal. They burp the alphabet and laugh riotously about it.

But not me. I am silent.

And I am in pain.

When I eat almost anything, air pushes up my esophagus and wants to come out a burp. But what I get is the air bubble equivalent of a ten-car pileup, a giant mass of pain and then a series of pathetic gurgling noises that sound, as my husband puts it, “like a sink backing up.”

Meanwhile, he’s over on the couch burping the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.

Before you suggest that I drink a soda pop to induce burping, it won’t work. All that does is add more bubbles that park themselves in the middle of my chest. And then the sink backs up. And then I have pain.

Also, please don’t suggest, as my friend Jen did, that I pat myself on the back to get things moving. Self-patting seems impossible and I can’t ask my husband to help because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have time in his day to burp his wife.

And so I cope.

I don’t know what my co-workers think when they hear the gurgling after lunch coming out of Cubicle #1. I’ve never asked.

When I can suppress the gurgling, I’m happy. But that means no air is moving and so I blow up like Violet Beauregarde, the big round blue girl in Willy Wonka. I am a ticking, expanding time-bomb that wants to go off so desperately.

So listen. If you can burp, burp away. Burp like the wind! I will forever and always be jealous of you.

And I will never ask you to mind your manners. I’ll ask you instead to “Teach me, Master.”

I recently posted a silly Facebook update:

“I don’t understand why the MacArthur Foundation didn’t award me a genius grant. I figured out that if I pour my coffee creamer in my mug before the coffee goes in, then I don’t need a spoon to stir it. The coffee does the mixing as it goes in. If that’s not genius, then nothing is. Honestly.

This got me wondering what tips you guys might have for saving time or aggravation, or just generally making mundane things in life easier. It might be something you do in your house, at work, or for your family.

I always remember a little thing my Mom did when I was small. She always wanted me to be nice and warm getting out of the bathtub. She turned on a space heater to warm things up, but she also sewed together two bath towels so that the whole thing would reach the floor and my feet didn’t have to be cold for one second. Thanks, Mom!

I’d love to hear about the creative things you do to make the little things in life easier and better. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Remember, no tip is too goofy or insignificant. No one will laugh. In fact, someone will probably thank you.

Go!

I’m pleased to announce two winners of Friday’s What’s That contest!

Cromely of Cromely’s World guessed it’s a razor blade storage or disposal unit. That wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough to earn a prize. After reading my update that someone was on the right track, local reader Kathy B. studied the comments and correctly guessed it’s a razor blade sharpener.

This one was made by the Twinplex Stamping Company in the early 1900s.

Here is the device in action.

SEE UPDATE BELOW

Hey, peeps! I haven’t been able to post much lately due to the day job, so I thought I’d submit for your examination a quizzical little object for a What’s That? contest.

I’m showing you the entire object because it’s so odd, no one would get it if I only showed a small portion of it.

The only hints I’ll offer are that it’s old and it’s not mine.

How to play:

Easy! First person to guess the object wins a Junk Drawer magnet AND your choice of bacon bandaids or chocolate chip cookie soap.

OK, so what is that?

UPDATE: Someone has guessed very close to the correct answer (and earns a prize). I won’t say who it was. I’ll only say that the object is NOT a pencil sharpener. This is a pencil sharpener. Some of you might remember that as the post wherein I yelled at everyone for getting it right away.

So here’s your second chance to win. Sift through the comments and see if you know who got close, and then take it a step further. I know you can do it!