Fresh and delicious stories about anything that amuses me, confuses me, or makes me blow a gasket. Take a look around the drawer. Just leave everything where you found it.
I know it’s not 2011 yet, but I’ve already been out to see the clock countdown to the new year.
I went to my first ever Peep Drop!
What’s a Peep Drop, you ask? Just Born, the company who makes deliciously sugary, marshmallowy Peeps, is located in my town. Every New Year’s Eve, they drop a Peep at two times: early evening (for kids and tired old people) and again at midnight, for people who can stay up past say, 10PM.
I’m a tired old person, so that meant fake midnight. My husband and I sidled up to the viewing area, and looked up to the sky to find a glowing fiberglass Peep hanging from the top of a giant crane.
As the countdown approached, screaming kids chanted “Drop-the-Peep! Drop-the-Peep!”
And then at the appointed time, Enormous Peep in all its paunchy yellow glory, was lowered to the ground to great fanfare and then fireworks.
After Mr. Peep touched down, an organizer came over to the area where I was standing and said “OK, press? You can come over now.”
OMG. She thinks I’m press. Should I go over? I can get real close and maybe hug the costumed Peep who walked around and cheeped at people.
And then I chickened out. I stayed behind while real press people got to get within inches of both real and Plastic Peep.
Sigh.
At least that’s the last regret I’ll have in 2010. Tomorrow’s a new year, ripe for plenty of new regrets.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, but I’ll play one on the blog today.
If you have sinus problems and prefer a non-pharmaceutical treatment, go get yourself a neti pot.
A neti pot is a container that looks like a cross between a small tea pot and Aladdin’s lamp. It’s used to irrigate your nasal passageway and relieve sinus congestion or allergy symptoms.
It’s also used to make you look more ridiculous than you ever thought possible.
You fill it with warm water, add non-iodized salt and then place the spout into one nostril, tilt your head and run the water out the other.
Ridiculous!
If you do it right, it’s not uncomfortable, just oddly, weirdly, bizarrely strange. If you do it wrong, you’ll feel like you’re drowning. I strongly suggest you do it right.
Why the neti pot?
I have not been able to breathe clearly from my right nostril for years. What’s worse is that I also suffer intense pain in my ears when I lie down, more so on my right side. I’ve discussed the ear thing with three different doctors and they are intrigued, yet stumped as to the cause.
While researching the ear pain issue on my own, I came across a forum where someone suggested a neti pot as a possible solution. Because I take advice from total strangers on the Internet, I thought perhaps if I relieved the congestion in my right nostril, it might also alleviate some pain in my ear(s), assuming the two issues are related. Isn’t that a good doctory assumption? I should know. Because I’m a doctor.
I prepared the pot and got right to it. I. Was. FEARLESS! I was also alone and not in front of a mirror. No one, including me, needed to see a drainage of the Kathy Canal.
The clearing effect to my nostrils was immediate and lasted a good while. I breathed equally well out of each side for the first time in probably a decade.
What remains to be seen is whether regularly-administered neti pot action will do anything for my ears.
More about that ear pain
Whenever I lie down, pressure builds up and it feels like someone jammed a knife directly into my ear and left it there. The pain varies. It can be sharp, burning hot, dull or throbbing. I’ve described the pain to my doctors as simply “My head’s on fire.”
Fun.
I’ve also said that if I had this kind of pain while awake and walkin’ around, I would be on disability. It would easily incapacitate me if I felt that measure of pain 24/7.
The reason I can tolerate it is because I’m mostly sleeping through the pain. It often wakes me up, but then I flip over to the other side to relieve pressure and pain in the ear. When the other ear hurts and wakes me, I flip back. I do that probably a dozen times a night.
Again, fun.
If the neti pot doesn’t help with my ears, at least I’m seeing results with my plugged-up nose. So it’s at least a partial win.
Oh, and some of you remember I said on Facebook that I might videotape myself using the neti pot.
For. Get. It.
Imagine filming yourself doing this and you will understand why I changed my mind.
Robot Lady Using a Neti Pot
So have you ever used a neti pot? Are you like some friends of mine who bought one, but are too afraid to try it? If you love your neti pot, share your success story!
UPDATE: I just discovered that I can’t use my neti pot over the kitchen sink, where I find it more convenient.
My cat Shadow thinks my nose is a faucet. Because she loves to drink water right from the tap, she tried doing the same out of my nose.
I know. Gross. And annoying. Thanks, Shadow. ‘ppreciate it.
A friend of the family enjoys my blog, but she doesn’t read it the way you do.
She’s in her 80s and doesn’t have a computer or access to the Internet. She gets my blog when I print out several months’ worth of posts and mail them to her at the post office.
A blog through snail mail. Weird, huh?
Whenever I print out posts I always sit down and read through them before mailing. Why? Because reading a chunk of your old posts in a quiet setting, on paper, is a full-immersion exercise that gives you a clearer picture of your writing. Much more than just browsing a single post on a computer screen can.
Because there is time and distance between me and something I wrote months ago, it almost feels like I’m reading someone else’s work. It’s fresh to me.
I discover a lot from this process.
When I laugh at something I barely remember writing, it’s like getting a surprise gift. “I wrote that? Not bad, Kathy. Not bad.”
It also gives me a chance to watch for negative trends that I might have slipped into over the years and that need improvement.
Here are some things I noticed:
1. I’m writing less. This last packet I sent was thinner than it should have been for five months and I know why. The larger my audience gets, the more afraid I am to publish something that I’m not sure will be a hit. There were periods I went as long as eight days without a new post.
When I first started The Junk Drawer, I published every 2-3 days. I want to get back to that, accepting the risk that something will fall flat. Sure, if I write more, there may be more stinker posts, but I know that I’m happier when I publish more often.
2. No matter how much I edit a post before I publish, I found some posts that still weren’t cut enough. I wrote things that weren’t necessary for the post theme, especially in the lead paragraphs. Some passages sounded awkward or lengthy, and didn’t help move the story along. Lotta clunky stuff in places.
3. I overuse some words, use clichés when I get lazy, and sometimes something I write doesn’t even make sense to me when I read it months later. I’d sit there and think “God, what must my readers have thought? They sure are forgiving.”
4. I’m insane. But we knew that already.
So in this season of giving, give yourself a little gift.
Print out some of your stuff and cozy up with it for a while. You might be surprised by your own writing, find a few things you can improve upon and renew your excitement for blogging.
So you know those unlucky motorists stranded in snow on a Canadian highway for 24 hours?
Yeah.
Better them than me, because if that were me, I’d be the one pounding on other people’s car windows asking to be let inside because my car ran out of gas, I have no heat and no blanket or anything that qualifies as something smart people do to winterize their vehicles.
I put gas in mine. It makes it go. That’s helpful.
Here’s what Ihave in my car that’s not:
The front seat: Christmas wrapping paper, a shopping bag, ice scraper and a newspaper from last week that I picked up from my driveway.
The back seat: Jumpin’ Jesus. We have a Consumer Reports magazine, an alumni magazine, a shopping bag, a bag of plastic bags, notebooks, empty water bottle, ice scraper, a Congratulations on Your Graduation card I addressed and stamped a year ago but never mailed, a hoodie from a spring coat and a pair of bacon sneakers.
Nowhere in there is a blanket, first aid kit, water, flashlight, extra clothing and gloves or snacks.
Also nowhere for anyone to sit, actually.
So don’t ask me for a ride or anything. I clearly own and operate a junk yard on wheels. I’m an unprepared Pig Pen.
How ‘bout you?
UPDATE: OK, so y’all got me worried about being impaled by something in the back seat of my car in an accident.
There must be a sign on my back that fellow grocery store shoppers can see. It reads “Ask me anything. I have all the answers, even though I don’t work here.”
That sign had me shopping for baptism cards once for complete and clueless strangers.
Today it had me explaining eggs.
While I was scoping out butter, a nearby unkempt but harmless-looking young man addressed me thusly: “Can you tell me the difference between these eggs?”
Oh, God. Here we go again.
I don’t know anything about organic eggs, brown eggs, or Omega-3 eggs or the difference between them.
I don’t know if they taste different and I don’t know where they’re hatched, if they’re local or shipped-in, or if they’re more expensive or healthier than regular eggs.
I. Do. Not. Know. What about me says I know eggs?
In the millisecond it took for me to get all stressed out about this impromptu egg class, the young man followed up with this:
“The sizes. What are the different sizes? This is my first time shopping for my wife and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
I thought “OMG, dude. If you don’t know that the difference between regular, large, extra large and jumbo eggs is purely their size, then no one can help you. Ever.”
But because he was just so adorable and helpless, and I wanted his wife to have the illusion of a husband who can make egg choices all by himself, I decided to give the egg noob a straight up answer.
I said “There are large and extra large eggs. Jumbo is probably unnecessary. Just go with the large eggs and you’ll be fine.”
He grabbed the large eggs, thanked me as he walked away and I wished him a good breakfast.
Then I picked up eggs for myself. I opened the lid to see if any were cracked. Some were. At least three.
Egg noooooooooob! I forgot to tell him to see any of his were cracked!
There go my chances for becoming a Certified Egg Instructor at an accredited grocery store near you.
I have a new love in my life. Don’t worry. There will always be bacon.
My new love and I met while I worked on a colleague’s computer. She noticed I was admiring something on her desk, which I used while I worked.
The attraction was instant and I fell hard. Be still, my heart.
When I finished my work, she gifted me with one.
So what is my new love?
A pencil.
But not just any pencil.
It’s a Pentel OE519 automatic grippy pencil with a twist eraser and deliciously bold 0.9 lead thickness. Oh, yeah, baby.
Hello? Are you still with me?
You fainted, right? I know! I did too!
And I almost had a meltdown yesterday when I couldn’t find it in my desk. I thought someone stole it. I wouldn’t blame them. I mean, it writes like a dream, very sturdy and forgiving — you can press really hard and not break the tip.
I’m no fan of Christmas shopping. Not so much for the usual reasons, like having to shop with members of the insane general public and spend every last dime doing it.
It’s more because I’m the world’s worst gift-giver.
About five Christmases ago, I shopped online for really creative gifts for my husband Dave. Gifts I actually put some thought into. Things I assumed he would go nuts over and say “Wow! This is the best gift ever! You really outdid yourself!”
That was the year I got all artsy-fartsy and bought this:
An egg lamp.
An egg lamp that got used on a desk by the computer for a few weeks before it mysteriously wound up here and where it remains to this day:
An egg lamp that I thought was so funky and awesome and eggtastic and the gift to be outdone.
Wasn’t.
And then.
Last night my helpful husband said “Kathy, if you need any ideas for Christmas gifts for me, I would really like a small lamp for the computer room that I can sit on the desk.”
But …. but …. the egg lamp. I know it doesn’t cast enough light to read by. I know it doesn’t go with anything in the room. I know it’s only good for show and it was stupid and expensive and expensive and stupid, but still. It’s an egg lamp. Can’t you just squint and go blind a little?
No? OK, then. Let’s go with function over form this year.
Would this work? Cuz I really need it to be a winner this time.
So what about you? Have you ever bombed spectacularly in the gift-giving department?
If you’d like to read about more craptacular gifts, Tribal Blogs is having a worst gift carnival! Head on over to Redhead Ranting’s The Worst Christmas Gift, Ever and then check out the carnival to see more gift carnage. It’ll put you right in the holiday spirit!
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