The Junk Drawer

For a brief period between high school and my first real job, I worked the night shift at a mall.

One of the stores, a large pharmacy, was remodeling and needed people to unload merchandise from shelves, clean and reorganize while renovations took place. And they wanted it done round the clock so the store could reopen quickly.

It was the single worst job I’ve ever had.

My heart goes out to anyone who works 11PM-7AM. You’re basically living in another world. All the people with day jobs are relaxing or sleeping when you’re going to work. It completely messes up your view of everything.

I shot mental darts at people who were joyfully getting their days started, while I was going home to unwind and then sleep — in the middle of the day.

In the middle of sunshiny, action-packed, outside-noise-disturbing-my-sleep days.

Knowing that the rest of the world is up and active, while you’re unconscious, makes it that much harder. When I’d wake up, I could never really enjoy what was left of the day because I knew I had to report for work later.

I wouldn’t work the night shift again if you paid me ten times my salary now. Not worth it. Not kidding.

Anyone work a night shift? Anyone in a relationship with one who does? I’d like to hear how you cope.

I’d especially like to thank any medical or emergency professionals who routinely work the graveyard shift. You make it possible for us to call someone for help in the dead of night. Thanks for being there.

1. Flying alone is a piece of cake, even when you’re directionally-challenged. O’Hare airport is blessedly idiot-proof. I wasn’t stressed at all on the actual flights, except for the part when the pilot not-so-briefly forgot what city he was flying to when he announced take-off on the trip home. A full planeload of people screamed him the answer.

2. Wearing heels for 14 hours straight is a bad idea. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. Still did it. I almost blew my knee out the morning of the first day and then limped along for the next 10 hours. My dumbness knows no bounds.

3. If you’re not a psycho fan of Tim Gunn, you will be when he’s standing right in front of you. And you’ll squeal with glee when he reads your conference badge and tells you he loves the name of your blog. It’s official! Tim Gunn hearts The Junk Drawer!

4. Swag is highly overrated. Liquid swag is the devil. That cracking you hear is BlogHer women everywhere getting realigned at their chiropractors.

5. Friends shouldn’t let friends have access to a bathroom scale, especially when the stupid friend already knows she’s carrying six pounds of vacation instabloat, and yet still wants proof of it.

6. Helpful women will dig through their purses for dental floss when you tell them you have a poppy seed stuck in your teeth that you can’t remove with a fingernail. When someone says they have a floss pick, but it’s been used, you will consider borrowing it anyway. I wound up having to dig for it again. BlogHer women who were at the bathroom mirror with me during that exercise, I’m sorry. I’m generally not so disgusting at home.

7. Chicago has the very coolest art! And it’s SCARY BIG!

8. Stressing over what clothes to wear to BlogHer is a colossal waste of time. Spending gobs of money on it adds insult to injury, especially when a button falls off a brand new $49 shirt mere minutes into wearing it. Which cute top did I wear not once, but twice? The one that cost me $1 at a consignment shop. Yes, one dollar.

9. You should not buy delicious treats for people back home that you soon discover you want for yourself. Sorry, Heather. You can’t have ’em now. But I did buy you a cheap keychain with your name on it. And you can have a T-Mobile clicky pen. And a $2-off coupon for laundry detergent. I’m such a giver.

10. SEO experts at the conference tell you that Top 10 Lists are blog gold. So there you have it!

Bonus #11. Head over to JD’s place and admire her awesomeness. She was among a group of bloggers invited to read one of their posts to an audience of over a thousand conference attendees. I’m still amazed that my good friend could get up there and give the performance of a lifetime, all without vomiting on stage as she feared.

Thank you JD for EVERYTHING! Thank you JD’s family for getting me to and from the airport and for being such entertaining company on my trip! Thank you BlogHer for putting on such a good show. See you in NYC for BlogHer ’10!

I once lived in an apartment that saw two kinds of bug infestations. Bees one spring and thousand-leggers one summer. That summer tested me and tested me good.

If I came home late, I feared flicking on the light since the time I found a thousand-legger chillin’ out just above the switch. After that, I kept a little flashlight in my purse to survey the area for critters in the dark.

Another time one fell out of the dishwasher onto my bare foot, which triggered a spastic freak-out dance that my downstairs neighbor later told me made her wonder if I was going to crash through the floor and land in her lap.

The last straw was when one particularly ballsy thousand-legger tried to take a shower with me.

Soaking wet and washing my hair, I turned around and opened my soapy eyes to find a giant specimen crawling up the back end of the tub.

I let out the kind of scream suitable for any decent slasher movie. The kind of scream that comes from deep within and shocks you that you can even make a sound like that. Is that me? The kind of scream that should prompt all of my nearby apartment-dwellers to call 911. Don’t do that! I’m naked!

My first course of action was to pummel that thing into submission by shooting it with water and sending it down the drain. I jump out of the shower and aim the showerhead at my intruder. Die! Die!

What? It’s not moving.

Oh, wait. It is moving. Just not toward the drain.

Oh, nooooo. My little visitor evidently works out at the gym. Pilates much? Every single one of its creepy, crawly legs fought against the current and it was making remarkable progress up the tub wall. Of all the bugs in the world, I get Arnold Schwartzelegger.

A jet stream of water clearly wasn’t going to save me.

I was going to have to crush this thing with my bare hands. Well, not bare. These hands would have to be covered with a half roll of paper towels.

Dripping wet, I run off to the kitchen, trying not to slip on the floor, crack my skull on a counter, fall to the floor unconscious and have a new problem. Not the bleeding cranium, but returning from the ER with the knowledge that the freak insect is still in my apartment!

I pull at the roll of towels like I’m starting a lawn mower and scrape up enough courage to smash that thing with my paw — and then what? Where do I put it? No, not in the toilet. We know now water is no match. It swims!

It needs to go outside. I need an exit hatch. Yeah, yeah. An exit hatch. My bedroom window!

A woman on a mission, I dash to the bedroom with my enormous supply of Bounty towels. I thrust open a window and then head to the bathroom.

Stay cool. Breathe.

OK, Mr. Not Welcome Here, prepare to meet your Maker. And why, by the way, did your Maker make you? Are you good for eating other bugs? Is there something beneficial about you that only entomologists know about? Regardless, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and you need to die today.

I position the wad of towels over Leggy McLegs and grab and squish with all my might. I spin around, run to the bedroom and toss the whole crushed-appendage mess out the window.

I am safe now. Safe from a thing that weighs less than a postage stamp, yet has the power to make a person a million times its size and weight turn into a quivering idiot. I don’t get it. That. Shouldn’t. Be.

OK. Now where was I? Oh, yeah. Taking a relaxing shower. Fat chance of that now or ever again during the Summer of a Thousand Legs.

Epilogue: I moved to a nice, bug-free townhouse that fall and I haven’t seen a thousand-legger since. It is bliss.

A week from today I’ll be crying. That’s because I’m flying on a plane all by my baby self to attend the BlogHer conference in Chicago.

Flying alone and not getting lost once I land are two of my biggest worries. The other one is not recognizing anyone I know from their blogs at the event.

So here’s my plea:

1. Drop a comment in the drawer if you’re attending BlogHer so I know to look for you.

2. Look for me at the conference. I’ll be carrying a tote with my Junk Drawer logo on it. On the first day, I’m planning to wear black slacks with a white, black and green print wrap top. You will see me constantly readjusting this top because the wrapped part doesn’t seem to want to stay positioned over my boobs evenly. This obsession will annoy you.

3. Thankfully, someone told me I still look like the picture shown on my blog, even though I’ve gained weight since that photo was taken. I think it’s because all of the fat is localized to my butt. What is different about me and my old photo? I now wear eye glasses.

4. I’m bringing Junk Drawer magnets to hand out to anyone who says the Secret Word, a five-letter word I’ve used in many posts over the last year or so. Think! Think!

5. If you meet me, please introduce yourself by your blog name and/or moniker you go by on your blog. I don’t know everyone’s real names yet, even if we are friends on Facebook.

6. I’ll be hanging out with JD of I Do Things. She’ll be puking on Friday night right before she gives a reading of one of her hilarious posts at the Community Keynote. Try and catch that! If you recognize her before you recognize me, I’ll be the one attached to her. A social butterfly I am not.

It’s T-minus 7 days! Hope to see you there!

In my last post, I asked you to tell me what your favorite gross food combinations were. You didn’t disappoint. I told you I would pick one disgusting combination and award a Junk Drawer magnet for best worst one.

Since there were so many icky combinations, I decided to put some of them to a taste test because I’m nothing if not adventurous. Or stupid.

The ingredients:

• Cheerios cereal
• Pre-cooked bacon
• Peter Pan peanut butter
• Italian bread
• Minute Maid orange juice (concentrate)
• Sweet pickle slices
• Breakstone’s cottage cheese (Eek! I’m gonna eat it!)
• San Georgio elbow macaroni
• Welch’s grape jam
• Whole milk and spaghetti sauce (not pictured because I’m a dumbass and forgot to put them out)

For my journey, I started with the combinations I thought were gross, yet intriguing, and moved toward the ones I thought were sure to make me hurl.

First up, whole milk and orange juice concentrate, suggested by Babs Beetle. She says "I used to half fill a glass with orange juice, the kind you have to dilute with water, then top it up with milk and wait for it to curdle – about 10 seconds. Once it was all lumpy I would gulp it."

I put about 2ozs. of concentrated OJ in a glass and then filled the rest with whole milk and stirred.

This stuff is delicious! It reminds me of a place that may still be popular in shopping malls called Orange Julius. I’d forgotten all about it until I drank this. My recommendation is to make sure you do use full-fat, whole milk and perhaps add crushed ice. It’s extremely rich, though. You have been warned.

Grade: A

Next items: Orange juice and Cheerios cereal, offered up by Jenny, who wrote: "I guess I discovered this next thing when one day I poured a bowl of Cheerios and then discovered we had no milk. So I put orange juice on top and … WOW! IS THAT EVER GOOD!"

I took the rest of the concentrate and diluted it to make regular OJ. Poured it over the Cheerios and dug in. It was a fairly enjoyable sweet treat for breakfast, but the OJ gave it a biting aftertaste. Think of it as a candy bar in a bowl. With a kick.

Grade: C+

Next, we have the peanut butter-related combinations.

First, peanut butter and sweet pickle slices. Heather says, "I like peanut butter & pickle sandwiches, but the pickles have to be hamburger dill slices."

I have to admit I thought this was pretty high on the gross scale. To me, pickles should only be eaten straight up or on a burger. Let me tell you, this stuff was divine. The savoriness of the peanut butter, mixed with the sweet and tart flavor of the pickles, makes for a surprisingly good combo. And who doesn’t want a little crunch in their sandwiches?

I took a good four bites out of it, but had to discard it because I had a lot more to eat. If not for the calories, this one would have been completely finished off.

Grade: A+

Our second bacon-related combination is the one I believe was mentioned most often in the comments — bacon and peanut butter. I had such high hopes for it. I think you’re all familiar with my bacon addiction. What could go wrong?

Here’s what can go wrong. Apparently my bacon addiction is so bad, I now need 10x the bacon to get the same delirious reaction to it as I once got. I couldn’t taste the bacon! Did I make it wrong? How many slices should I have put on? Five are pictured here. All I tasted was the peanut butter. I’m so depressed.

Grade I wanted to give it: A+

Grade it got: D

Damn.

Now here’s where I encountered my first feelings of trepidation. The very idea of mixing grape jam and macaroni is so completely bizarre to me, and when I combined them in a bowl, I wanted to throw it out before tasting it. But I soldiered on.

Just look at it. Think about it. Does it look appetizing? No. Would you want to eat it? No. How did I like it? I didn’t. IT. IS. NASTY. Grape jam belongs on only one thing. Toast. Period.

A woman named Kathy suggested this and I wish she had a blog so I could link to it, and you could all go over and tell her she needs to have her head examined. Or her stomach.

Grade: F

For our last test, I spread my culinary wings. I don’t recall ever having eaten cottage cheese in my life. Why? Because to me it looks like yogurt that’s a year past its expiration date.

SewDucky suggested this concoction: "… cottage cheese, heated, with either pistachio pudding or spaghetti sauce mixed in. Everyone thinks I’ve lost my mind."

Everyone is correct.

I still have the aftertaste of this dish, and not a good aftertaste. I would characterize the flavor as sort of like manicotti filling, without the benefit of being enveloped in a blanket of pasta and being flavorfully-seasoned. Couldn’t take more than two bites. Warming it up did not help.

Grade: D

I hope you enjoyed my little taste test. You’ve all been so good waiting patiently for me to announce a winner.

******* Drumroll please *******

Winner in the category Worst Food Combination I Never Thought I’d Like: Peanut Butter and Pickles

Winner in the category Word Food Combination I Wouldn’t Eat Again For Any Amount of Money: Grape Jam and Macaroni

I’ll contact the winners shortly. As soon as I clean up my kitchen and explain to my husband why the garbage is full of half-eaten sandwiches and mushy things.

Today’s post is short and sweet. I recently told a friend how I love the taste of uncooked instant oatmeal combined with a fruit yogurt.

That fact made her sick and it got me thinking about things people eat, specifically, foods we combine that have no business fraternizing in the same cup, bowl or dish.

So let’s have it. What foods do you put together that you love, but that make others ill when they see you eat it?

Grossest combination wins a Junk Drawer magnet.

Oh, and if you remember the circumstances under which you thought to put the foods together, include that too!

Go!

I love to mow the lawn. It’s good exercise. But there’s one problem. I suck at it.

While my husband Dave is recovering from shoulder surgery, I’ve taken on the chore of mowing every weekend. He feels bad he can’t do it, but that’s not the reason he should feel bad.

He should feel bad for the mower itself and everything it touches.

Herewith are the things I’ve done to the mower or with the mower in the last year:

1. I took out part of a tree he planted in the front yard. I don’t know how. All I know is when I motored past it, an entire branch broke off and got stuck in the hole that keeps the pull string attached to the mower. I threw the branch to the ground and mowed over it a bunch of times –the equivalent of hiding the body.

2. The first time I mowed alone, I got too close to a curb and the mower tipped over into the street. I heard a horrible propeller-type banging. That’d be the blade striking concrete at 3,600 RPM. I didn’t turn off the mower for a really long time because — all together now — I’m an idiot!

3. Dave likes to remove the metal rainspout extensions that run parallel to the ground before mowing. You know, so the grass is cut evenly. Why move perfectly placed rainspouts when you can run right over them? That’s mowing the efficient Kathy way.

4. Those big gashes at the base of the mailbox post? Sorry.

5. Remember, honey, how nice the front yard used to look when I would take the time to make nice diagonal lines through the yard? I know it looks like a child hopped up on Jujubees mowed it now, but really, can’t the grass just be short? We’re not going for design points, are we?

6. If the azalea bush doesn’t blossom next year, well, let’s just say I was getting tired and I had to take it out on something.

I love mowing! It’s so easy my way.

Dave, you’re not reading today’s post, are you?