The Junk Drawer

I have a co-worker who farts. Well, not in the conventional sense. She doesn’t fart, but her shoes do.

Apparently Dr. Scholl’s makes a product called Massaging Gel Insoles that are supposed to provide added support and comfort to your feet all day long. Slip them in your shoes and you’re Ginger Rogers.

The problem, she says, is they’re made of plastic. Plastic makes your feet sweat. Sweaty feet make farting noises when you walk. We always know when she’s coming because she sounds like a fart machine. Farty fart fart.

Doesn’t anyone test these things in the real world before putting them out on the market?

I would make an awesome product tester:

1. If I worked for Dell, I could have told them years ago how stupid it was to stick front side USB ports underneath a big plastic panel that you have to lift up and then search around for the ports. The uplifted panel shields light from the area you’re poking around in, plus the ports are fixed at a 45 degree angle. Some of my clients at work ripped the damn things off permanently and it’s still hard to insert a thumb drive.

2. If I worked for Charmin, I could tell them that their Ultra Strong version of toilet paper doesn’t stand a chance in hell of being flushed down the toilet on the first try. It’s the consistency and thickness of paper towels, and no one with half a brain would try to flush paper towels. Stick with the Ultra Soft brand if you want to save a thousand gallons of water.

3. If I worked for any computer manufacturer, I would have told them how hard it is to read which is the DVD drive and which is the CD drive. Nice job printing which is which, embossed in black writing on a black background.

4. If I worked for TV manufacturers, I could tell them that people need about five buttons on a remote control, an ON/OFF button, two for channel-changing and two for volume. If it’s a DVR controller, a few more. I do not need half the buttons on my current controller. I can’t find the ones I need. Oh, and it’s the size of a mailbox. I almost need two hands to use it.

5. If I worked for Honda, I would have told them that the trunk latch and the gas cap release are too close together. I’m either opening my truck at the gas station, or opening my gas cap door when I need to unload groceries.

6. If I worked for a bedding company, I would have told them to make comforters the way they used to be made — so they’ll fit in your home washer and dryer. For God’s sake, at least put a label on the package that says “You’ll have to drag this beast to a laundromat and spend your Saturday afternoon pumping quarters in a jumbo washer because that’s the only one big enough, and then you’ll have to drag it half wet to your car because it’ll never get dry, and you may drop it on the way because it weighs fifty pounds and it’ll get nice and dirty again.”

So there. Will somebody please hire me as a product tester? And Dr. Scholl’s, you need to do something about your farting insoles.

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Humor-bloggers wear fartless shoes.

No one has to tell me I’ve gained weight this year. Not that anyone would dare say that to my face, or they’d have a mouthful of Chicklets for teeth.

And not that I don’t recognize what happened to my body over the last 12 months. I see it every day in the mirrors I haven’t already thrown a drape over.

But as so often happens with weight gain, you tend to ignore the obvious and just buy bigger clothes. Last week, my butt decided to publicly and rudely remind me of just how big it’s gotten. It almost injured a person.

The date: Friday, January 4.

Where: In a seminar room at work. I was about to give a presentation to a group of graduate students, who had just begun filing in at the door next to the instructor’s station.

How it happened: As I was preparing materials and kicking equipment cables out of the way, I backed up into the line of students and my butt nearly jettisoned a petite, twenty-something woman past the coat rack, through a wall and into the next room.

I. was. mor-ti-FIED. One, because my body was capable of almost knocking someone to the floor, and 2) because SHE apologized to ME. Oh, please don’t say you’re sorry. I almost killed you.

For those of you who think I’m exaggerating, I swear on a stack of Twinkies I’m not. The scale doesn’t lie. I’ve gained 25 pounds since last December. Twenty-three of them went straight to my butt, and the other two went to my face: one pound to Chin #1 and the other to Chin #2.

This bizarre distribution is because I have one of those pear-shaped bodies. I’m two sizes bigger on the bottom than I am on the top. I look pretty much the same in my blog photo as I did when it was taken about a year ago. It’s the lower half of me that needs work.

So what to do? I’m not averse to exercise, but it’s much harder to get outdoors and walk in the winter. I prefer walking as exercise over anything else. My plan is to try and burn calories indoors, at work, so I don’t have to walk in the cold and darkness at night.

Here’s the plan I’ve devised:

1. I’ve begun to stand at my desk while working. So that I’m not hunched over while typing on my laptop, I stuck a box under it so that it’s at waist-level and easier to work. It looks stupid, but I’m considering alternatives.

2. A friend sent me some information about JARM-ing, (J)ogging with your ARMS, an upper-body exercise you can do anywhere. Basically, I’m flexing and flailing my arms around in the privacy of my own cubicle and burning extra calories while doing it. It looks a little goofy, but I’ll take goofy over fat any day of the week.

3. No more junk food, especially not take-out. My husband and I like to order take-out on Friday nights. And Mondays. And Thursdays. And weekends. When he asked yesterday if we could get cheeseburgers and cheese sticks, I replied “No. We’re not doing that anymore.” Simple as that. I’m pretty militant about my plan. He has no choice but to lose weight with me. He’ll thank me later.

Although this “standing while working” thing has its benefits (you burn about 100 calories an hour vs. 40 if you’re just sitting), standing so long will hurt you in some way. The first day I tried it, I did it for six of nine hours and started to get short stabbing pains in my lower back.

Tweaks to the plan:

1.  When a colleague saw what I was doing, he promptly yelled at me “You can’t do that in THOSE shoes.” So now I wear supportive sneakers when I’m not meeting with clients.

2. I mentioned my crazy plan to my sister, who promptly yelled at me “You can’t do that! You probably have a quarter inch of carpet over a concrete floor! You need a special mat for that!” A special standin’ and flailin’ mat?

So I’m off this weekend to shop for a couple things. One, something else to put my laptop on, so I can get rid of the cardboard box it’s currently sitting on. And two, a “special mat,” whatever that might be. I need to find something that a chair can roll over for times when I need to sit down and rest.

Is my plan working? Most definitely. I’ve lost three pounds this week. I’m not going for quick weight loss, although I know how to do that (I once lost 7lbs in one week on The Survivor Diet, eating nothing but rice and water. It works, but it’s unsustainable. Plus, I think it can kill you.) The loss has to be gradual, the way it went on. I accept that, despite wanting to get rid of this big butt by next Wednesday.

If you’d like to share creative diet and exercise tips that work for you, drop a comment in the drawer. I’m open to crazy.

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Humor-blogs has some fine butts, I’ve heard.

Last month I treated everyone to the product of my laziness: The Pumpkin Tree Display. Make sure you go look at it to see how nice it looked a couple weeks ago.

Here’s how it looks now. The day before I took this picture, none of these pumpkins looked that bad. They had mold, yes. But they were still round. And not oozing. And still pumpkins.

Somewhere between 7AM and 5PM Monday, the two orange ones simply gave up the fight. Actually, they had help.  Here in eastern PA, we enjoyed a 70+ degree day, blue skies and balmy. Me thinks this isn’t the best environment for three-month-old pumpkins to thrive.

Now, we had trash pickup day on Thursday. Do you think I’d be smart enough to take them to the curb? Of course not. Here they will sit for another week and God knows what they’ll look like then.

Since it seems that members of the pumpkin family have a built-in, self-implosion mechanism in place, it’s my hope that they will keep imploding and somehow they will disappear on their own and I won’t have to don a gas mask and hazmat gear to remove them.

I no longer go out to turn the Christmas tree lights on. I’m afraid of the pumpkins. But someday I’m going to have to face my fear and bag these babies up. It wouldn’t surprise me if maggoty things are living under them. I’m paying dearly for my laziness.

Pray for me.

It is amazing to me what I’ll stick up on this blog for a laugh. Those of you who have been expecting my prom pictures will be disappointed. I can locate only one of them. I found two, but they’re both of my junior prom. The senior one is nowhere to be found, though I promise to keep looking.

For now, you can have this.

It’s my 7th grade school picture and if it isn’t obvious enough, this is what NOT to do if you have very curly hair. I did not walk around with a book on my head all day. I did not sleep upside down. I fought the curl and this is the result.

I basically had an afro growing up. You cannot straighten my kind of hair because it’ll get really mad at you for going against the natural flow of things, revolt in the worst way, and come out looking like this.

In my earlier years, my poor mother would try to make me look presentable for school and have to contend with the kind of curls that don’t like to be bothered in any way, shape or form. Every hair on my head was anti-comb.

She would often use a detangling product called Johnson & Johnson No More Tears. It was a lie. There were many tears. "Mom!!! You’re killing me! Stop it!" You can’t get a brush or comb through an afro, and no spritzing from the J&J bottle was going to help.

She resorted many times to the only thing that got rid of tangles and my general rat’s nest. She cut the angriest curls out. Wouldn’t you like to see a picture of what that looked like? Let me keep looking….

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I bet the people over at humor-blogs have good hair.

No, not this kind of lost.

A totally different, addictive, bizarre kind of lost. The one you’ll find on ABC, January 31. Lost is back!

Herewith is an 8 minute and 15 second recap of the first three seasons. If you’re a Lost buff, you’ll get the meaning of an 8:15 clip.

Now listen to me. If you haven’t seen the show, but plan to catch it on DVD, DO NOT WATCH THIS. The clip will spoil everything for you.