The Junk Drawer

Ten minutes after tossing two blankets in the dryer, I went back to "un-ball" them and a piece of bacon fell out from the last time I ate a sandwich on the couch where the blankets were.

Discuss.

Here lies The COVID-19 book, the crappy notebook I found in some box in the days after I started working remotely, now with only one empty page left. Normally, I keep scrap paper at my campus office desk and jot little things down I don’t need to keep. I note anything else of record electronically. This book is filled with all those little things, now an accidental historical record of how events at home and work-from-home unfolded since March.

There are plenty of quick "need to do" things, Zoom meeting notes, and project reminders. But there’s also grocery lists for curbside pickup, new passwords for new accounts I had to create for SO. MUCH. ONLINE. SHOPPING., the notes about what’s wrong with my eye "red, sore at the temple", what’s wrong with my tooth "hurts, size of a golf ball", what’s wrong with my hip "started suddenly, no injury I remember" — all to explain to various doctors and dentists, some for whom it took many phone calls and friend and family recommendations to make appointments to see during a pandemic. It was much harder to see a dentist than a doctor in those early days. A dental patient is the worst patient of all. Your mouth is open and everything sprays. COVID loves that.

There are other notes.

• "Take vacation." What a joke. I forfeited a week and I’m on track to lose much more this year.
• "Set up family zoom session." Missing my family.
• "Gueben. Cole slaw. Chips." First curbside takeout order.
• "Gained 7 pounds. Still able to walk. Feeling overwhelmed and depressed." Virtual doctor visit.
• "Great answer." During a now colleague’s Zoom job interview.
• "OMG. She got furloughed. Are we next" The woman in question probably never coming back.
• "Staff restructuring." "Layoffs/furloughs." "Reduce expenses." "Slow return to campus."
• "I don’t have enough help."
• "Can I floss right away?" Follow up to temporary filling before complete root canal replacement.
• "Holy shit. Love him." A new staffer with a refreshing attitude.
• "Call UGI. A/C broken."
• "Dominick the Donkey." Answer to a Fibbage question on family game day.
• "Eggs. Smart Ones. Uncle Ben’s rice." Grocery.
• "Outpatient rehab services. Hip.
• "Stay in vehicle. A nurse will come get you and take temperature." Dentist.
• "Send in request to work from home indefinitely."
• "Signs needed: Rules, masks, swipe in, locked dors, digital, print, hours, one per elevator."
• "COVID student isolates. Roommates would quarantine."
• "Ring light. Bidet. Floor lamp. Office chair. New rug.

The list goes on and on, and so does the pandemic. I start a new notebook tomorrow.

So I’m driving home from my BIL’s house on a highway near me and got behind a truck hauling some earth moving machinery and that always makes me nervous because you should never trust anyone to secure their loads well enough and I didn’t want to be behind him if that thing slipped off its bed and landed in my face so I got in the passing lane to scoot around him and sped up enough to get back in the right lane ahead of my exit home except I didn’t go fast enough and couldn’t find a space to move over so I missed my exit and that’s when I decided to just keep driving to the next exit where I could get off and stop at a Shammy Shine to get my car washed and so when I got there, I paid at the drive-up kiosk and got in line for the wash and was so proud of myself that I followed the directions of the guy at the start of the wash queue well enough to get my wheels aligned on the track thingy and you should consider yourself skilled if you can do that in one shot, but while I was patting myself on the back for getting my wheels in place and I was all set to put my window up so I don’t get wet and prepared my iPhone to film going through the car wash because that’s so fun, that’s when I made the mistake of putting the car in park instead of neutral and the guy screamed at me “Neutral! Put it in neutral” and I thought “OK, mister. I have all this stuff to do making sure I don’t get wet and all, and now you’re yelling at me to put the car in neutral and I meant to do that, swear to God, but I forgot and geez, man, who the hell ever puts their car in neutral gear for anything except car washes and give me a second here and cut me some slack, jack!

Here, have a soothing video of my car wash. It was hell getting it.

One of the problems with buying an ice cream cone in the middle of a hazy, hot, and humid summer is melt speed.

Get a large cone and you’re forced to inhale it to minimize the inevitable dribble-down-the-hand mess, but you risk brain freeze eating too fast.

Plus, when you suck down ice cream the ability to savor the flavor is diminished by 79.4% according to a study in the Journal of I Made That Shit Up.

Sure, you could order your soft serve in a cup, but what fun is that? It’s not. You twist-cone your soft serve. You cup-pack your hard scoop. It’s the law.

What you might do to mitigate the lick-to-melt race is downgrade to a regular cone and be satisfied with that. But what if you wanted more than a regular?

This is what you do:

Your husband drives you to Rita’s and you order a regular-sized cone and tear in. Mere blocks away, he notices that you’re almost down to the cone already and there’s another Rita’s nearby.

He says “Kath. You’re making good progress on that. Do you want another?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Next Rita’s, please.”

In the time it takes to get to Rita’s #2 you’ve just polished off the bottom tip of the cone, you know, that part – the best part – that serves as a handy reservoir for all the melty goodness that collected at the bottom. That last crunch is the delicious period on your ice cream sentence.

You pull into Rita’s #2, get out, order a second regular twist on a waffle cone, pay, and dig in again.

A mile out, you begin to realize the error of your ways.

1. Regular + half a regular = uncomfortably full.

2. You don’t want to finish Part II of the Twist Plan because you’re not a garbage disposal and your waistline wants no part of those unwanted calories. Your driver rejects them, too.

So now what?

This is what you do:

You ask your husband to pull over at the next out-of-the-way place so that you can dispose of .5 of a regular ice cream cone.

“Where?” he asks.

“Over there. The cemetery.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

You pull aside and scooch up close to the grass. You lower the window. You stick your arm out and with one flick of a wrist the cone contents come flying out  – TTHHWWIIIIPPP! – and into the grass, where ants within a ten foot radius can’t believe their good fortune that the sky delivered them ice cream like a screaming meteor and plopped it at their feet.

Ahhhhh! Much better.

You’re now left with just the cone, coated in a bit of residual ice cream, in all its crunchy goodness, with only enough calories you consider reasonable to eat.

Yes, I will still order soft-serve in scorching heat. No, I will not get it in a cup. Yes, I know that’s easier, but it’s just not the same. Summers are for twisties and sprinkles and improving melt management skills. This 50-something kid still has a lot to learn.