Dresser Drawers and Life

Does the condition of one’s dresser drawers indicate anything about one’s actual life??

If it does, and it may, my life is a sad state of affairs. It is a mixture of:

• old clothes I may want to wear someday because I might lose weight (and get back my youthful shape)

• items I stashed when we started our house project 3 years ago, because they were fragile I didn’t know where else to put them

• a teddy bear that I bought 6 years ago for only $4, but my daughter was too old to give it to, so I am saving it for gift

• special cards and letters from my children and husband

• all the Christmas Cards from 2009

• several categories of underfrillies

-very old long ill-fitting slips (black and white) for when I played in orchestras

-ugly colored underfrillies which I have never worn (but could not throw out) that came in packages with other colors I liked

-underfrillies I keep because though they are years old (and probably no longer fit) they are so hard to find I keep them

-ugly pink long underwear that I might need if we go elsewhere where it snows

• an incredible collection of mismatched night wear

• smaller framed photographs that hung on the wall 3 years ago before we painted

• one swimming suit that I haven’t worn forever and and doubt that it fits

• several jewelry boxes complete with a few items of nice wearable jewelry (that I forget to wear) and of course a number of jewelry pieces that need to be deep-sixed or is that deep-nined (what does that mean?)

Well, you get the idea.

It’s not just my dresser drawers: all the nooks and crannies; cupboards; drawers and closets of my whole house suffer from the same malady.

Perhaps this is just how life is. It doesn’t fit in a nice neat package.

Please tell me I am not alone.

Guilty or not Guilty

I sat in the courtroom shaking a bit.

Was Hero guilty of not yielding on red to the police officer who was not at the intersection when we turned right after stopping?

The police officer had made a U-turn before the intersection and hit us, but wrote on his form that Hero had hit him; and said the light was green so we were at fault.

“It is really, really close,” the judge said; and then repeated himself after hearing Hero’s 9 page presentation that included the turning radius of a Crown Vic and other details.

Finally, those wonderful words, “Case dismissed.” Hero was not guilty.

Nine days later we got a letter in the mail from the Police Insurance Company saying Hero owed them $3700 damages.

The insurance companies are battling it out now.

Where are they?

So, I thought I should take a break from working on my book to buy something to eat for supper tonight.

I went to Store S (which is 25 minutes away) because the meat prices are better and their health items such as vitamins are usually less expensive.

Also, their tea (I am very low on tea) and the salad dressings are much cheaper.

So now that I am home, I can not find the carton of eggs, vitamin bottles, box of white oolong peach tea, and 3 bottles of salad dressing that I thought I had put in my cart.

They were not on the register tape. So I didn’t pay for them. But where are they?

1. I never put the items mentioned in the cart. I just thought I did.

2. I had a brain fade half way through shopping and put the new items in another cart and left the “lost” items somewhere in a cart in the store.

3. The checkout clerk did not check out all the items I had placed on the counter.

Where are they???

Which Dictionary?

I’m once again cleaning my everything closet. Since my new laundry room is in the original everything closet, the everything closet is now in a room which just happens to be my office. I am getting claustrophobia from all the boxes and books and need to get rid of books I no longer use or need.

The problem being deciding what I need and what I don’t need and what I will never need. Case in point is the dictionary category. This is what I have:

1. Webster’s Universities Dictionary Unabridged, 1941
5 inches thick, my husband’s

2. American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, republished in 1967
2.5 inches thick

3. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977
2.1 inches, tattered, old looking

4. Random House Webster’s Dictionary of American English, 1997
1.8 inches, good condition, ESL/Learner’s edition (I bought it, but why?)

5. The Synonym Finder, J.I. Rodale, 1978
2 inches (Do I need this with all the online Thesaurus info?)

6. Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Rhyming Dictionary, 2001
3.5″ x 5.4″ and .5″ thick.

What do I keep and what don’t I need? This is why I have so much in my everything closet!

Priority Letters: 1831 to 2010

I went to the friendly US Post office today. A not so friendly person was at the counter.

My goal:
Ship a book and some OLD letters to my cousin who had loaned them to me via low cost.

When I say old, I mean letters from the 1860s and 1870s.

I forgot that a book and letters in the same box could not be sent as media mail. (If letters aren’t media, what are they?)

It did not matter that the letters that had been mailed at least two times—to the Lumberland, NY Post Office in 1860, and to me in 2009—were being returned.

Letters MUST ALWAYS be sent priority. ALWAYS! At least that is what I was told—twice.

I brought the box back home. So now what do I do?

Do I ship it UPS which is $3 or so more? Do I ship it USPS in the same box and pay the rate. Do I split the letters and the book up and send it in two packages which will most likely be as much as I wouldn’t pay to begin with?

What will I do when I send the letters from 1845 and 1848 back to my mom?

Those letters were first mailed to the Town of Lumberland Post Office which just happened to be in one room of the home of my great-great-grandfather, James Eldred—the postmaster from 1831 to 1851.

Green and Blue

Some months ago we downgraded our garbage pick up because of cost. Out here in the west we pay a company to pick up our garbage.

Well instead of a big dumpster, we now have two tall hard plastic trash cans—one is green and the other blue. Sunday nite the green trash can goes out with regular garbage which is picked up on Monday morning. Tuesday night the blue trash can goes out with recyclable (green) trash.

This is very confusing when I empty the inside recyclable into the correct outside can. I have to think twice. I have a bag of recyclable trash and it seems wrong to put what would be termed green trash in the blue bin.

It drives me crazy.

R-r-r-r-r-r-ing #2

So, when I hear a ring tone in the house, these are my choices:

Don’t answer if it is:
1. Gary’s office phone.
2. Gary’s Cellphone.
3. Gary’s Skype account.
4. Andrew’s cellphone.
5. Andrew’s Skype account.
6. Joanna’s cellphone.

Answer if:
1. It is my cellphone.
2. It is my Skype account.
3. The home phone.

The home phone brings up another whole discussion. Currently something is messed up with the landlines, so there is only one place that a phone will work—in the middle of our home, quite a distance from the bedroom where my office is—until it is moved into the empty bedroom which is full right now with 4 of 4′s stuff while his room is painted.

Gary got me a second phone for the bedroom where my office currently is, but I can not talk to anyone in my room because of static. So when the phone rings, I push the talk button and hurry to the hall to get a better reception, only to be disappointed often because it is someone wanting to clean carpet or a community service message telling me I need to use seatbelts.

Not wanting to go over the free minutes allotted, I am trying to use the cellphone only on weekends. Gary tried to fix me up with a Skype account which I can call out from the computer for less than $3/month, but pay pal wouldn’t work.

Enough about random thoughts on ringing.

Good news though: Thursday 8 a.m., the countertops are to be installed!

R-r-r-r-r-r-ing

I recently acquired a new cellphone number—long story.

I keep hoping I don’t lose the half page orange sticky note that the number is written on. It took me four years to memorize my last cellphone number. There’s no chance of me memorizing this number.

Maybe I should have a listing for myself in my own address book?

Phone Stats for Hero and Super Mom’s family

Cellphone: 7, including myself, well actually 9. Two members have both a
skype and an att number.

Land lines: 2

What’s wrong with one phone number per family? Fifty years later, I still remember our phone number from our house in Michigan on treeless Peach Street—282-4908.

Beware of the spot

As I have mentioned, we are in the midst of a kitchen remodeling, though if the countertop ever arrives, we will be done except for lighting. But this isn’t our first time working on kitchens.

Around 1984, we downsized from the three-story home we had built, to a more affordable two-story home, a bank repossession that was very nice, though I think the owner had taken the kitchen cabinets with him.

The kitchen floor is what I remember. No matter how clean the floor was (and I must confess to not being a clean freak. I would rather read a good book), it would never look clean because the linoleum was dull and dirty spots were part of the pattern. We replaced that flooring.

Four years later, our ‘new’ home in Prescott, Arizona, included ghastly 1970s gold carpet and drapes, as well as the dreaded ingrown spot in the kitchen flooring.

When we moved to our present location twenty-one years ago, our kitchen floor was saltillo tile. “You’ll never have to worry about cleaning it,” the seller told me. I didn’t have to worry about cleaning it because whether I washed it by mop or on hands and knees, or just left it, you could tell no difference. (Part of the problem, it had never been sealed correctly.)

So when we decided to retile our home (which involved taking up at least 1000 sq. ft. and then laying at least 1300 sq. ft., all which Hero has done), we had to pick out a pattern.

And, you guessed it. The one that worked the best that we could afford, has once again built-in-spots.

Though I’m not complaining. I love my new kitchen, spots and all.

Nothing is easy

So, four weeks ago we ordered the countertop for our newly remodeled kitchen, which at this point is all done (including newly tiled and sealed grout in the new pantry), except for lighting and—the countertop! (Well also a UTBY table and chairs at IKEA which…well that’s another story).

The projected arrival of the black microdot formica countertop was three or four weeks.

Three weeks ago they came out and took measurements for the said countertop.

A week and a half ago, they called and said it would be $42 dollars more—did they not start the process until then?

Today, we got a call. The laminate that we chose blisters when they try to roll the edges. We were given several choices, one of which is to go back to the store and make another choice (something that took us weeks to find the first time). We can just wait, too.

Either way, it’ll be a while until:

• The “lazy susan” can be installed, which will give a place to put items I am now randomly storing and can not find.

• There will be doors to the sink.

• I will have a new sink and faucet.

• I will have complete countertop coverage—no empty places and no slopes (though I must hasten to add I’m very grateful to have a substitute counter).

• I can make a decree that there is a severe penalty for anyone leaving anything on the countertop when the obvious choice is the dishwasher for dirty dishes. (Right now things are a bit cluttered and it’s hard to tell if the kitchen has been cleaned.)

Nothing is easy—the countertop glitch is not really a surprise, is it?