The Junk Drawer

A co-worker of mine sneezes so violently I’m afraid his spleen may come flying out one of these days. And it startles me every time. I told him “Geez, dude. Ring a bell before you do that.” Was that rude of me? I think it was a little bit rude.

I went to a church bazaar at lunch with another co-worker this week. It was their last day, so they handed us grocery bags and said “Anything you can fit in this bag is one dollar.” So we loaded our bags with a lot of stuff and paid our dollar on the way out, thinking all the while “We really should pay more than a dollar. This doesn’t feel right.” When we left, the handle of my co-worker’s bag came off, the bag fell to the floor and broke her ceramic bundt pan. Clearly, Jesus would have wanted us to give more generously.

I went to my credit union to deposit a check. While signing paperwork at the table near the teller windows, I dropped a pile of deposit slips, the flip-calendar thingy and then my purse, and I hit my head on the corner of the table picking up all the dropped items. A clerk sitting at a nearby desk rolled her eyes at me. I’ll give you an eye roll, lady. To add insult to injury, the ink in the pen chained to the table ran out. Tuesday was not a good day for me.

Those who follow me on Facebook know now that my husband puts mayonnaise on everything. This week he put it on pizza. Commence vomiting.

The reporter from NPR who interviewed me on-air about Windy the Plastic Bag emailed me Monday to ask how she was doing up in her tree. That both cracked me up and warmed my heart. Incidentally, when all the leaves on Windy’s tree come down, I’ll post new pictures of her. What’s left, that is.

Someone in my blog audience got her first boyfriend and she stopped commenting here. I miss her. But her boyfriend adores her, as well he should, and so it’s all good. But still. Sniff. Pass me a tissue.

The student assistant who works in my office is 6’ 4” tall. It means that he can see over the partition to my cubicle. He’s caught me more than once doing something I shouldn’t by peering over it to ask a last minute question. So now whenever I’m shoveling, say, six miniature Halloween candy bars in my face, I have to make sure he’s really gone before I begin another session wherein I disgust myself for all I can eat in one sitting.

I know I made a co-worker green with envy when she watched me back my car into a parking space in one quick, perfect action. I’m an excellent back-in-parker-inner. Admit it. You’re jealous, too.

Hope you guys had a good week! Don’t forget to turn your clocks ahead on Sunday. Or is it back? Whatever. Just turn it whatever way you feel and hope for the best.

Honey, can you roll a little to the right?

Uh. No. Can you?

Nope. My cheek fell asleep again and I can’t roll.

How many times have I asked you not to call me honey? We dated as seedlings for like, what? Two weeks? It’s over and you know it. I still can’t believe you found me again. And now look at us.

Oh, honey, it’s not as bad as it seems.

Is too. And quit it with the honey.

Well, I’m not sorry about it. Why do you always have to find the negative?

Look, the patch has rules. One pumpkin every ten square inches. You just had to roll over near me, didn’t you?

I was cold.

Too bad. You knew we’d bake in the sun during the day and get chilly at night. Those are the rules.

I thought they were going to give us blankets. Besides, I like us as a couple. It makes us unique.

It makes us stupid. And stop saying we’re a couple. We’re not. And you’ve ruined it for me. We’re supposed to be two pumpkins with two stems. We have exactly one between us. We can’t even sit right! Who wants a pumpkin that can’t even sit right?

Well, I quite like it.

You would. This isn’t normal. I want to be normal.

Normal is overrated. And what’s all this about rules? Why do you always have to follow the rules? Maybe if you weren’t such a tight ass, we’d still be together.

Maybe if you weren’t so clingy, I’d have given us a chance.

Why all the hostility? I can guarantee you someone will buy us because they like us as a pair. And, admit it, you still like me.

If you think someone’s going to buy a defective set of pumpkins for Halloween, you’re out of your gourd.

Aw, you made a funny. See? You look all cranky, you act all cranky, but you made a funny anyway. Is that a smile I see? Are you smiling?

No, that’s a frown. If I wasn’t contorted like this, you’d know that.

Aw, I choose to think it was a smile. Now let’s make up. How ’bout a kiss?

We’re already kissing.

Hee. My plan worked then.

Hey, peeps! I’m home from a business conference I attended in Norfolk, Virginia. Oh, sweet blog, how I’ve missed you!

Here are some random observations I collected along the way:

1. A garden shed with a crucifix slapped over the door and a hand-painted sign counts as a church in the south.

2. I almost threw my back out unloading pillows from my bed every night. It is possible to have too much comfort and too much poof.

3. If the conference staff puts out chafing dishes every day full of delicious bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and buttery biscuits, and you get accustomed to it, when they start putting out stuff like this…..

this is how much of it you will take.

4. Apparently, the Tyson plant somewhere in Virginia has a Chicken of the Month award for birds on good behavior. We saw a gaggle of them feeding outside the factory on the front lawn.

If death row chickens knew how to fly at a decent clip, they could, you know, leave.

5. The south doesn’t breed tail-gaters or speeders, and everyone politely lets you into a lane when you need to get there. Unlike in the north, where drivers will sooner shoot out your tires than show you the least bit of courtesy. North, take a lesson.

6. After going insane being on the road for eight hours, when your driving companion leaves your neighborhood to return the rental car, and you follow behind, you will  laugh so hard you cry when you see her make the first turn the wrong way and wind up in the suburban abyss for an extra ten minutes it kept her from getting the hell home already.

7. Having a panic attack while riding on a leisure yacht going only 2 knots per hour will get you laughed at by total strangers.

8. Having a conference badge hanging around your neck and swinging off your boobs will get you unintentionally ogled by total strangers trying to read your name and university, printed in teeny tiny typeface.

9. Four cups of coffee in the hotel room the morning of the drive home, plus four more during conference events and one more on the way home is sort of too much. It also gives you the crazy eyes, an unforgiving bladder and lead foot.

10. Coastal cities rock it with the seafood. And so do seafood restaurants.

11. That guy who was stuck to my trunk on Philadelphia’s I-95, in the rain and on a shoulderless stretch, can go to hell. You proved that I had every reason to fear driving on that highway and ruined any chance of me ever attempting it again.

12. Southern hospitality is alive and well. When your fat ass knocks over a dozen formerly organized pashmina scarves from a display in a gift shop — not once, but twice — the cashier will apologize to you for the incidents. You will feel like a dumb northerner and pray she doesn’t have a blog of her own.

I’m glad to be back! Missed you guys!

I like cheese. A lot. When I find a cheese I love, I pretty much stick to it until I can’t get it anymore.

My husband Dave went to the store the other night and I asked him to get my favorite cheese. He asked me what it was called.

“I don’t know. All I know is what the package looks like. Take my cell phone and call me from the cheese section and I’ll walk you through.”

He gets to the store and calls me as instructed from the wall of cheese.

I tell him “OK. Are you at the display that faces the donuts?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Now the cheese I want is a sharp cheddar, in a rectangular block and comes in an opaque wrapper and has a red or burgundy label.”

“I’m looking and it’s not here.”

“Look on the right side, maybe the second shelf from the top. Maybe the middle-ish shelf.”

“It’s not here. Orange?”

“No. Not an orange label. Red!”

“No. I mean orange cheese. Orange cheddar?”

“No! It’s a white cheddar with a red label. Keep looking.”

“It’s not here. I’m looking at all the cheeses now.”

“Well, it’s gotta be there. They never run out. There’s always like a dozen of them. It has to be there.”

“It’s not here, I swear. I’m done. I’m leaving the cheese.”

Now I’m sad and mad and cheeseless. I decide to go to the store myself the next night to find my cheese. I even bring my camera so I can take a picture of the cheese for future cheese reference.

I get there and see that the store people moved all the cheese over to the other side of the display, the side facing the deli. And they moved all the meats to the side where the cheese is supposed to be by the donuts. Why?

To make matters worse, my favorite cheese is not there. Who moved my cheese?!

I get home and immediately scream at Dave for not telling me that the cheese has moved to the other side of the display and if he’d only told me that the cheese was on the side facing the deli, where it never was before, then I could have told him that they moved the cheese and I would have known something was amiss and I would have halted the looking-for-the-cheese expedition the other night!!! And now I find out they DON’T EVEN HAVE IT!!!!

And then I took a breath, stopped spitting fire balls, my eyes returned to their normal size and all the angry snakes retreated back into my Medusa head.

The look on his face. Abject fear. Like he realized at that very moment what a beast of a woman he married and is it too late to get out now?

I’m sorry about the cheese, dear. I just like it a lot. You hereby have adequate grounds for divorce.