The Junk Drawer

I participated in a Tribal Blogs chat last night and the subject of eggs came up. I explained how much I liked to make dippy eggs and only one other person knew what the hell I was talking about.

You may call them something else, like an egg in a basket or egg in a hole. If you’re sick of your eggs scrambled or in an omelette, here’s a funner way to make ‘em next time.

Kathy’s Dippy Egg

Step 1: Press out a hole in one slice of bread. I use a glass, some people use jar lids. Hold aside the bread you cut out, or if your pan’s big enough, throw it in to get toasted, too.

Step 2: Heat a frying pan to medium-high heat. Toss in a pat of butter (or more, the butterier, the better!)

Step 3: When the butter sizzles, toss in the bread to soak up the butter.

Step 4: Crack an egg and deposit it in the hole.

Step 5: Let it fry for a minute or two, until the egg white starts to solidify. Meanwhile, toast another slice of bread. I like extra buttered toast with my eggs.

Step 6: Carefully flip the bread/egg to “seal” the top side of your masterpiece. Allow it to fry for about a minute.

If the yolk breaks, you’re screwed and you should just start over. Feed your mistake to the dog.

Step 7: Butter the first slice of toast and place on a plate.

Step 8: Carefully scoop out the dippy egg without breaking the yolk, and flip over on top of the other slice of buttered toast bread.

I did a quick Google search on dippy eggs, and one woman said she wishes she knew what to do with the cutout. Well, duh. You dip it!

Step 9: Cut up pieces all around the egg, as well as the buttery toast underneath and dip into the egg for a savory, delicious breakfast. Bacon optional.

And there you have it. Kathy’s Dippy Egg!

Have you ever made these? What do you call them?

Everyone told me that when I joined a gym, I would have lots of blog fodder to write about.

On the second day, fodder stepped on a treadmill right next to me.

There’s a sort of etiquette you have to follow at the gym, and Rule #1 is that you don’t stare at anyone else working out out near you.

You can get a sense of them, you just don’t actually look at them.

But fodder was mesmerizing.

I couldn’t look away because he was wearing the most hideous toupee I’ve ever seen.

I feel bad for men who go the toupee route. None of them look good, but I suppose being bald is the lesser of two evils.

I get it.

What I don’t get is why this guy chose to get a perm toupee. A black, poodle doo that was probably the last one on the foam heads when he went shopping.

Y’all probably know I have a hate/hate relationship with my curly hair. It never does what you want and you only get like three good hair days a year. (BTW, I had one on Tuesday, so I only have two left for 2011).

Anyway, this guy looked like a Chia pet and I felt bad for him. Not because he was bald. He probably looked better bald.

But because he chose to buy the worst kind of fake hair imaginable.

I sometimes have dreams where I have long, flowing, thick and shiny straight hair and I flip it around like a model does during a photo shoot.

I always feel happy during these dreams because if you have the power to imagine yourself with good hair, you don’t ask for kinky curls with a mind of their own.

You ask for lush and luxurious hair you can run your fingers through without getting them stuck in it.

I suppose perm toupee guy might have different toupees to wear out and about and maybe perm toupee is also gym toupee.

I haven’t seen him since and if he’s swappin’ out his head for a different look, it’s possible I wouldn’t recognize him.

In a way, I admire him. If he’s so sure of himself in that mop top, then I shouldn’t feel so bad the way I look without makeup, sweating at 5:30AM surrounded by rock hard bodies.

Just please don’t have a blog and consider me fodder. My fodder looks pretty ugly at that hour.

First, my apologies for being MIA for a week. I’ve been laid up with the flu.

I’m done with the tissues, chicken soup and achy body. And I’m showering again, much to the delight of my cats, who even though they lick their own butts, thought I was getting kinda gross there for a while.

At some point during my illness, the correct guess for the last What’s That Wednesday contest came in. The answer was submitted by Jim, who didn’t leave a blog URL.

The object in question is a paper jogger, a device used in the printing industry to properly align paper and dissipate static.

Paper rests in the corner of the machine:

When the machine is turned on, the paper is shaken down, hitting the two metal sides where you see the paint has worn off.

I wanted to take video of the machine in action, but it’s terribly loud and I wasn’t feeling up to having my head explode.

Here’s a video of a similar jogger doin’ its thing:

Congratulations, Jim! I’m impressed you were able to guess that! I’ll write you soon to see which prize you want.

Now that I’m feeling better, I hope to get my writing groove back. In the meantime, I want to share an older post with you if you haven’t seen it. In honor of the Westminster Dog Show that took place this week, I give you My Interview with Remy, the standard poodle who won her category in 2008. It’s one of my all-time favorite posts.

Have a great weekend!

Some bloggers put a headshot of themselves on their blogs, and like me, did so when they started blogging.

Years later, that same picture is still there. For some, they still resemble that old photo.

But not me.

I’m many pounds heavier now than when this picture was taken.

I want to look like my headshot again.

Which is why I joined a health & fitness center last Sunday. Sure, I should have joined long ago for the health benefits, but I admit it was more vanity that got me there.

That’s because I’m speaking at a blog conference at the end of June. I’ll be meeting fellow bloggers who’ve only known me visually by that picture.

When I registered for the conference, I realized I didn’t want to show up and have no one recognize me. Worse, I imagined them huddled in a corner whispering, “Wow. She doesn’t look like I thought she would. Is that really her?”

So I’m doing something about it. Finally.

Every day at 5:30AM, I show up at the gym, shove my stuff in a locker and look in a mirror that faces another and another. The dreaded 360.

I don’t know who that woman is because that’s not who I see when I think of myself.

But the hard reality is that it’s what people see when they look at me and it nearly brings me to tears.

Somehow I’ve managed to look in mirrors past and ignore the obvious. That extra junk in my trunk, the double chin, the tree trunk legs.

You get used to it. I fell into a dangerous habit of thinking “It’s not so bad. I’m not that fat. There are people heavier than me. It could be worse.”

But I’m already worse.

Fifty pounds worse than my perfect weight of 2004.

And so there in the locker room, I reacquaint myself with those extra pounds. Face them. Hate them. Mark their last days.

I do an about face and head through those doors.

I stretch, I strain, I slog, I sweat.

I smile, too.

Because I imagine my old self emerging. A stronger, healthier, thinner me. Pound by pound, I’ll get there.

And then when I reach my goal, people will say “She’s just like I pictured.”

Maybe better.

Wait and see.

This is another one of those items that could be really easy to guess or really hard. I’m sorry if you find it terribly difficult. No I’m not.

Good luck. That’s all I’m sayin’. Don’t hate me.

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 of either bacon or eyeball bandages.

What is that?

I have eyebrow OCD.

No, I’m not one of those women who plucks her eyebrows until there’s no hair left and then have to pencil in new ones. That’s just freaky and wrong.

I will, however, obsess over a wayward, disobedient hair and won’t be able to function until it’s plucked and gone.

You know that hair, right? The one that sticks out so long it starts to curl like a question mark, when all the other hairs are lying down flat like good little hyphens? Yeah, that one.

I did find this, though. It’s a Swiss Army card. I think you use it if your office gets hit by an avalanche and you have to MacGyver your way out.

Lookie here. We have scissors, a letter opener/blade, a pressurized ballpoint pen, a magnifying glass, an LED light, four screwdriver tips and TWEEZERS.

Score!

When I get home to a normal pair of tweezers, I even out and shape up my brows like I should have done sooner.

I make a mental note to buy a spare pair of tweezers so I can keep one at work because I’m pretty sure I’ll see another question mark – or worse, an ampersand – and I want to be ready for that bad boy.

&

Yeah. It could happen.

I had a nightmare last night. One of the sweaty, high-anxiety, glad-I’m- awake-now variety.

It wasn’t about being chased by an ax murderer. It wasn’t about finding myself taking a college exam that I hadn’t studied for. It had no vampires, ghouls, ghosts or zombies. Nothing monstery.

It was far, far worse.

It was about accounting.

Bookkeeping.

Ledgers and missed deadlines.

Yeah. I know. It was that bad.

I haven’t worked in a university accounting office for twelve years, and yet last night I found myself back there and freaking out about a month end close.

At the end of each month, I ran a report that automatically redistributed the months’s utility and maintenance charges to all the fraternity and sorority building accounts.

A percentage of the services bill was allocated to each building based on its square footage. It was a pain to do because the data entry was tedious and time-consuming.

Plus, one wrong number and the program would fail. If the percentages didn’t equal 100%, the whole thing would explode and you didn’t have enough time to recover. You’d have to fix it the next month.

In my nightmare, I realized I went eight months with old percentages. Incorrect ones meant nobody was billed correctly and now I’d have some ‘splaining to do.

THE HORROR!

In my dream, I told my boss about the problem and started crying. There’s no crying in accounting! Luckily, she was understanding and I could dab my tears away.

The nightmare ended well, but still had me in a tizzy. That I could even be thinking about that job after 12 years away is horrifying and probably something for which I still need therapy.

I’m debating whether to contact the person who replaced me in that office. To warn him or her that a decade from now, they’re going to find themselves still worried about numbers. Scary, screwed-up, blood-thirsty numbers.

My advice? If you see a giant, ax wielding calculator leering at you from the shadows of a dark alley, RUN!

So do any of you ever have nightmares about things or places that stressed you out a hundred years ago, but that can’t possibly hurt you now?