You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2007.
Does anyone else out there have a phobia about loose hairs or stray nail clippings? I am pretty much okay with my own, if I see my nail or hair actually fall to the floor I can pick it up and dispose of it but if I don’t know the true origin of said hair or nail, my stomach lurches and I head for a tissue and gloves to dispose of it. Now, it’s funny because if I find a nail from one of my dogs or my cat, it affects me not. But a human nail clipping sends me packing. I once found some in between my couch cushions, I froze in a panic, staring at the clippings like I had just found the severed head of prize race horse in there. Once I could finally move, I backed away until I was far, far away from the couch and then went screaming for the vacuum. I could not even look as I sucked up the culprits and let me tell you, my husband has never heard the end of it. I don’t know where he clips his nails now but since he is not allowed on my couch any longer, I know it’s not there. If he is smart (and he is) he will forever clip his nails outside, perhaps in the back forty of our farm, far away from my all-seeing eyes. Actually, I can’t see crap anymore, EXCEPT wayward nail clippings.
And hair in the tub. I stayed at a Howard Johnson’s not too long ago and besides the fact that the room smelled really bad, there was a hair in the tub. A long hair, curled up near the drain. I would have demanded a new room but it was very late and I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging all of my stuff to another room so I lay in my bed, thinking, pondering, and worrying about the source of the hair in the tub. It took me a while to fall off to sleep just knowing that hair was in there. Now at home, I nag and nag my children to clean the hair out of their tub. I implore them to not leave it up to me but sometimes they just don’t care or they are too busy with their own important friggin’ lives to clean out the glob of hair that hangs out by the drain and I am stuck with the task. Why do they think it’s okay for Mom to do it? Don’t they care? In that aspect, I hope the mother’s curse works. I hope their kids don’t clean the hair out of the drains and they have to do it!! Ha, ha! Vengeance is mine!
My sister sent me the idea for this blog – apparently my issues with nails and hairs are a subject of family discussion. They probably sit around, shaking their heads and worrying over my precarious future. My phobias and I have become legends within my own family. I wondered why they always pat me on the top of my head, nod sadly, and look at me as if I might go bonkers at any moment. Perhaps they know something I don’t? I do know however, that they don’t leave hair or nails just lying about, stray villains that lie in wait for the opportunity to latch onto the bottom of my sock. Ahhh, siblings.
Okay, I admit it, I am a pack rat. If I think I may ever use it again in this life time, I hang on to it with such passion and zeal that is surpassed only by my loathing for disorganization. I am not talking about the scary kind of hoarding, the kind where you can no longer find your stove or refrigerator because your Publishers Clearing House mailings and Pennysavers have taken over the kitchen. I’m talking about run of the mill, good old fashioned, pack rat. I am not sure why being a pack rat has gotten such a bad name (perhaps we could be called pack hamsters instead – much cuter). My house is clean, the counters, shelves, and bookcases , clutter free. I have plastic bins (thank heavens for Rubbermaid) that are filled and stacked like tiny skyscrapers in every storage area in my house. I do not however, rent a storage unit just to store all my extra stuff. I do have a problem when I have to throw things out, it usually takes a couple of PB&J’s and a couple of glasses of wine before I can start but once I get going, nothing is safe. I can empty out ten bins in an afternoon and clean out an entire closet just for good measure. Goodwill and The Salvation Army love me – I keep them well stocked in clothes. It is true I still have Life and National Geographic magazines from the 60’s and all of my son’s Ninja Turtles from when he was little but am I not allowed some great stuff? My husband stares at the blue bins stacked in the garage and imagines with longing, shelves stacked with wonderful tools from Home Depot in their place but he leaves me alone most of the time. I have made a new rule after watching an episode of Oprah – whenever I buy something new for my house – something else must go. It has worked pretty good for me so far with clothing and shoes but I still can’t seem to dispose of magazines or books. They are my livelihood so I think they should be immune from the ditching rule and I also think my music should be safe from extinction. Now, if only my husband would agree and stop staring threateningly at my albums, 45’s and cassette tapes – who doesn’t need every Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, Steven Martin, and the Beatles album they have their hands on?
Is there any rhyme or reason to the Netflix Queue? It seems simple enough, you see a movie advertised, something you would like to see but not exactly worth the $50.00 you would have to shell out to go to the theater to see. You go to the Internet and pull up Netflix, enter your queue and type in the movie name, hit save, and there you go. The movie has been added to your queue and you think you are on your way to seeing this movie sometime in the next six months to a year. The movie sits in the Saved section of your queue while it makes it way through the theaters. Usually about 7 months later (or sooner if it didn’t do so well in theaters), your movie moves up from the Saved Section to the DVDs in your Queue section. Whoo-hoo! Now you’re in business! You check the Release Date, usually two or three weeks in advance, and a week or so before you move the movie to the top of your queue. Now you mistakenly think that that is all you have to do, that next week you will receive your movie in the mail for you to watch. How wrong you are! If you are one of the unfortunate souls who does not have a spot in your At Home Section on Monday when the new releases are sent out, you will find that on Tuesday morning, your much-anticipated movie has a VERY LONG WAIT!!! What happened??? You did everything you were supposed to, you have waited very patiently for months with your movie selection safely in your queue but now you have, A VERY LONG WAIT! So you wait. And wait. You leave a spot open in your At Home Section waiting for your much-anticipated DVD. And you wait. And wait some more. Now this is where it all gets a little fuzzy for me. Why do I have a VERY LONG WAIT??? Are the movies not being returned to Netflix? Are all the folks who were lucky enough to get the movie on the first day hoarding all the copies for weeks, laughing at the rest of us? What is going on here? This doesn’t make any sense to me. If one, I have had the movie in my queue for months, and two, I have a movie spot open, why am I not getting the very next copy that comes in? Who is more deserving than I? Where are they going? Who is getting them all? Case in point – I have been waiting for weeks for “We Are Marshall.” Is it so hard to send me a copy? I am leaving a spot open in my At Home section at all times for that elusive copy that might be sent my way. But every evening, with fingers crossed and a prayer under my breath, I enter the Netflix site and see the same message I have seen everyday for the last week: WE EXPECT TO SHIP YOUR NEXT AVAILABLE MOVIE ON _________________ (you fill in the blank.) Do I have the plague or bad breath perhaps? Or why doesn’t Netflix make new releases available for Instant Watching? Wouldn’t that cut down on their overhead? I am not opposed to watching the film on my laptop at my leisure. So here I sit, my Netflix Queue opened on my laptop with the same old message glaring at me from my At Home Section:
WE EXPECT TO SHIP YOUR NEXT AVAILABLE MOVIE ON MONDAY.
Oh, if only…….
My husband’s birthday was this week, another year older, another year wiser, you say? I say another year older, another year older. Anyway, he was in great need of a new watch as his old reliable Timex finally bit the big one and died a horrible death by drowning a couple of months ago. He put off buying a new watch as he knew his birthday was fast approaching and as he is one of those people who never needs anything for his birthday, Father’s Day or Christmas, he supposed that it would make the perfect gift and therefore went watch-less for some time. Since my seventeen-year old son is always broke, I thought I would let him buy his father the watch for his birthday. Like I said, my son is only seventeen and since he has little experience in buying gifts, especially for his parents, he bought his father a watch with one of those stretchy metal bands. Hardly ever a good choice for a man, but definitely not a good choice for a very large man with very large, hairy arms. My husband opened the watch and put it on his wrist (like a good dad), gave the obligatory oohs and ahhs, and when he removed it, he also ripped out ten or twenty hairs off of his arm for good measure. Now, not having the arm hair issue, I cannot imagine how badly that hurt but after having to endure shaving, plucking, and waxing for some thirty odd years, I had some idea. Since I did not wish my husband to endure needless pain and suffering on a daily basis, I offered to remove the metal band from the new watch and replace it with the leather band from his old Timex. An easy task you would think, wouldn’t you? The next morning, right after my husband left for work, I decided to switch out the bands on the watches. Now, I imagined this small project taking up about five to ten minutes of my busy day and wanted to get it done first thing that morning. I decided my first course of action would be to remove the band from the new watch first. I gently turned the watch inside out in order to see the tiny little pins inside the band and proceeded to gently stick my fingernail between the watch and the band, gently push down on the pin, which, sent it flying across my kitchen counter and onto the floor on the other side. Now my Golden Retriever, Chloe, happened to be standing in the kitchen, hoping beyond hope that I would inadvertently drop some morsel of food that she could immediately inhale, and heard the tiny pin hit the floor. Being a Golden, Chloe does not really care if the items she finds on the floor are actually edible or not and proceeded to try and eat the tiny pin. I screamed and hurried around the counter and snatched the slimy, wet pin from inside of her mouth before it could become part of her breakfast. I sat back down on the stool and returned to my “little” project. Forty-five minutes, two split nails and a couple of hundred curse words that would make a sailor blush later, I had replaced one side of the watchband. My dogs had given up entirely of seeing anything that resembled breakfast, as it was way past their time to eat. I looked at the clock, 9:30 a.m. and I still had one-half of the watchband to go. By this time I was determined to switch the bands, come hell or high water, and went back to the nightmare that is, changing a watchband. I finally finished up around 10:00 a.m., the second half not being nearly as difficult as the first, perhaps it was because it was later in the day and there was more sunlight in the room making it easier to see the incredibly small pins. After I had completed the task, I stared at the watch menacingly, and contemplated the fact that I had just wasted over an hour of my life switching out a watchband and pondered the question, WHY DO THEY STILL MAKE WATCH BANDS WITH LITTLE TINY PINS? I can remember as a child that was how watches were made and you would think after all the years someone could have come up with a better watchband. If you were a teenager in the 70’s like I was, you might remember those wide leather watchbands that had the little straps of leather that slid between the watch and the pin, thus making the “pin removal” unnecessary. Those were the “Good Old Days”. No one sat around wasting time struggling with watchband pins back then, no sir-ee. We had it made but someone has since determined that those wide leather watchbands were out of style (unless you were a member of The Village People) and we have had to return to the days of watch pin removal. In this wonderful, magnificent, incredible time of organ transplants, open heart surgery and Cold Stone Creamery, why can’t someone invent a better watchband? Why must we be made to endure endless hours of suffering in order to change a watchband? Why? I ask. Why? Is there no God? No one to hear our prayers? My advice to everyone is, buy either inexpensive, disposable watches that you can replace in case of “band” failure, or buy really, really expensive watches which will be repaired for free by your jeweler. He may have a tool specifically made to change watchbands easily, but at the very least, he has a jeweler’s loupe in the event that your watch pin sails across the jewelry store and becomes imbedded in the carpet on the other side of the counter. Plus, his dog won’t be there to eat it.
