The Junk Drawer

Next weekend I’m taking my first ever road trip alone. This should worry every single one of you, for I am The Queen of Getting Lost. You earn that title by losing your way only two tenths of a mile from your house.

Despite that, I agreed to drive 180 miles to meet up with three of my favorite bloggers, Bryan of Unfinished Rambler, his wife Kim of Dispatches from the Outpost, and Jenn of Cabbages and Kings.

For the record, I have never driven alone more than 30 miles from my home.

Am I nervous? Yes. Is my husband nervous? Crazy more. Have I considered all the things that can go wrong from here to there? Only since the day I agreed to this insanity.

But for every problem, there is a solution.

1. What if I get lost only ten miles from home? Solution: Turn around, shake my head, and ask myself why I thought I could do this.

2. What if the GPS breaks? Solution: See if I can finish navigating with my Mapquest directions.

3. What if the GPS breaks and my Mapquest directions get sucked out a window? Solution: Call my husband to come get me.

4. What if the GPS breaks, my Mapquest directions get sucked out a window, and my cell phone dies? Solution: Pull over and commence meltdown.

5. What if the GPS breaks, my Mapquest directions get sucked out a window, my cell phone dies, I have a meltdown and nobody stops to help me? Solution: Lock the doors, sleep in my car and have a nightmare about all the murderers waiting for a sitting duck like me, in which case this will be my last post. It was great knowing you.

If I do actually make it there, I likely won’t blog during the weekend. But I will tweet and update on Facebook. So check there next Friday afternoon to see if I’m alive.

If I’m a no-show, send a search party. I’ll be sobbing quietly somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Pssst! I have a secret. I’ve discovered a quirky, little-known game that’s played every year at Harvard commencement. It’s a game anyone can enter. All you have to do is show up and buy a ticket to get in.

Here’s how you play:

1. Show up within one hour of the ceremony. If you check-in between 11AM and Noon, it costs you $20 to get in. If you show up later, you have to pay $50. But half of that goes to financial aid fundraising, so it’s still worth it.

2. The neat thing is you can get part or all of your entrance fee back by looking for randomly-placed graduates eating cheeseburgers in their seats.

3. The game is played by taking pictures surreptitiously of up to three people eating cheeseburgers and presenting your photos to an appointed judge. Any picture showing a graduate who spots you taking the picture doesn’t count.

Each valid picture is worth a certain dollar amount off the price of admission. For example, if you have one cheeseburger picture, it’s worth $5 off. If you have two, you get $10 off. If you achieve the trifecta of cheeseburger picture-taking, it’s worth $20 off.

You can see that if you arrive between 11AM and Noon, and paid only twenty dollars to get in, you can possibly get a refund on your entire ticket price!

Aside from the chance to earn back your entrance fee, the photo judged the best is signed by the university president and gets displayed outside her office for a week. And you get monster bragging rights!

Do you believe me? You shouldn’t, because this is just one more bizarre dream I’ve had in a long line of dreams I tend to have as a result of seeing or hearing things before my head hits the pillow.

How this dream came to be:

1. I watched a show on the Travel Channel called Extreme Pig Outs, wherein some pub makes a 15lb. (6.8kg) cheeseburger and if anyone manages to eat it, they get their name on a plaque and eat free at the establishment for the rest of their lives.

2. I fell asleep watching an episode of Gilmore Girls, wherein daughter Rory announces she wants to go to Harvard.

3. I watched the Kentucky Derby, wherein longshot Mine That Bird stole the race at 50-1 odds and paid $103.20 on a two dollar bet. A trifecta win paid a whopping $41,500.60.

It’s possible my next post will be about me writing a post about a dream I had that led to writing a post. Or maybe after reading this, you will.

We have a winner! Blogless Donna was the first to guess that the What’s That Wednesday item was the stake of a landscape light. Donna’s been trying for some time to win a Junk Drawer magnet, so it’s my pleasure to send her one, along with a mystery prize: a box of bacon Band-aids!

I’d love to show you what the lights look like in my lawn, instead of on the floor with my cat, Shadow. But I never did figure out how to install them.

I remember when I bought them at Home Depot. A guy standing next to me said "Oh, those are really easy to put in" and I believed him. It didn’t take me long to discover they would be a pain to install and my husband never wanted them bad enough to do it for me. So they sit unused in our garage.

Anybody who lives near me want them? Email me if you do and I’ll be glad to part with them free of charge. There are 10 in the box.

Now, about that panic attack. I wanted to post a picture of Windy because she’s being swallowed up by new leaves on her tree. When I went out on the roof to take a picture, I COULDN’T FIND HER!

I always know right where to look in her tree. I just saw her a couple days ago and she was easy to spot. But when I couldn’t see her today I panicked and ran around to three other vantage points to see if I could get a better angle.

Nothing!

I went back to my office and a colleague of mine asked if I was all right. My sullen face said it all.

"I can’t find Windy!"

"Let’s go look."

We went to a couple spots: the steps, the third floor window, and then finally out on the roof again. We decided to zoom in with the camera as much as possible and see if we could spot her in the picture.

Here she is, limp and lifeless, and for the first time ever, I have to use an arrow to show you where she is. It rained today and I think that’s why she looks so bad.

Yes, I know it makes me insane to worry about a bag. But if you’ve been following her as closely as I have, you’d know what a loss it will be when she’s gone. Windy, don’t scare me like that!

Yeah, where I live there’s five more hours left of Wednesday. So this counts.

How to play:

1. The photo shows a small portion of a larger object.

2. First person to guess the object it’s a part of wins a Junk Drawer magnet and a mystery prize that may or may not be bacon-related.

Go!

What’s that?

Attention Bing visitors: I’m getting tons of traffic today for this post and everyone’s using exactly the same search string to get here. I’m perplexed why this is happening. If someone could leave a note in the comments explaining what led you here, I’d be super grateful!

November 16, 2010

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I enjoy watching House Hunters on the HGTV network, where a single person, couple, or family decides which house to buy after touring three of them.

Yesterday I watched in amazement as a woman said she was concerned that a 4,000 sq. foot house wasn’t enough room for herself, her husband and three small children.

Four thousand feet isn’t enough? Gimme a break!

I grew up with two parents and four siblings in a 1,250 sq. foot house and survived. And here’s the incredible part. All seven of us shared ONE bathroom and we didn’t die.

My husband and I share a 1,700 sq. foot home and that’s plenty of house for two people. In fact, we don’t even use the two front rooms at all. One is I guess what you’d call a sitting room. We don’t sit in there. We store crap in there.

The other room is our dining room. Ha! Dining room. That’s rich. We barely cook. So we have more crap and decorative items in there that we could do without if we had to.

Together we watched another episode of House Hunters where a couple sought an apartment in Paris. They had a budget of $300,000US and wound up buying a flat with no more than 400 sq. feet!

We agreed we could totally live in that small space. The payoff, of course, is that we’d be living in Paris.

How much house do you have? Do you wish you had more? Could you live with less? What would you want in exchange for less room?