If you ask me, springtime is synonymous with yard sales. All over America, moms are clearing out their overstuffed closets, getting rid of old, worthless junk. And I’m not just talking about their husbands lying on the couch drinking beer and watching the Poker Channel.
I’m also talking about that lime green Nehru jacket you bought in 1972, which never was in style to begin with. Or that model train set that your kids last played with during the Reagan administration. Or your late ‘60s lava lamp that always leaked pink ooze. Why on earth are you still holding onto all this crap? Remember the Latin saying, Crape Diem (“seize the crap”). Time for a yard sale.
When planning your yard sale, scour your house for things you no longer use. While I know it might be difficult, it may be time to sell your Big Mouth Billy Bass singing plastic fish. Let some other family enjoy the hours of entertainment it has provided to you and your 3 am drinking buddies.
A yard sale is a great opportunity to reduce the clutter and make a profit in the process – and by profit, I mean finally unloading that universal gym taking up two-thirds of your garage, which you bought seven years ago for $1,295, used precisely five times and tried selling for $499 before marking it down to $249, then $149, then $49.95, before finally settling on a $25 Starbucks gift card and a free car wash. (Remind me later to talk to you about your negotiating skills.)
In preparing for your yard sale, there are a few things you need to do. Enlist the kids to help out. Teach them a few things about sales and negotiations. On second thought, given your universal gym fiasco, never mind.
I’ve decided to come out of the closet about my little dark secret. I’ve lived with it in quiet shame my entire life. Until now, nobody has known about it. Not even my kids. Will they respect me after they read my public confession? Will you?
I simply can’t hold this secret in any longer. I hope I won’t ruin my marriage. This is really hard to talk about. I am searching for the right words. Okay, here it comes……
I am ………… a lifelong……… slooooooow reeeeeeader.
I confess. My slow reading problem started in first grade. I would read a passage like this: See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. See Dick throw the ball. See Jane catch the ball. See Jane through the ball. See Spot catch the ball… and I’d think, Golly! (What do you want – I was in first grade.) This is going to take forever! Couldn’t they have shaved off five pages simply by stipulating in one concisely-worded sentence that the three of them were playing with the ball? Little did I know then that Dick and Jane were just the first chapter of my slow reading saga.
In seventh grade, our teacher at my all-boys school, Mr. Alanson, made us read Marjori Kinnan Rawling’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 novel The Yearling, about a young deer named Flag that becomes a family pet, then eventually dies, and everybody cries. Scientists should have stopped searching then and there for a cure for insomnia. I had discovered it. Took me forever to wade through this award-winningly boring book. [Suggestion to the author: Marjori, next time, spend a little more time on plot development and little less time describing a tattered leaf’s meandering journey down a gurgling creek.]
The United States shares a border with its neighbor to the north, Canada, that’s 5,525 miles long – or if you happen to be Canadian, that’s 8,891 kilometers – not that anybody really uses kilometers, mind you. Did you know that our border with Canada is the longest unprotected border in the world? I’ll bet there are a lot of things you don’t know about our friendly neighbor to the north.
As someone who has been married to a Canadian for 25 years, I am an expert on appreciating the subtle cultural differences between our two nations. I continue to be surprised by how little most Americans know about the great nation of Canada. When asked, What’s the capital of Canada?, 55% of Americans guessed Toronto. Another 25% chose Montreal. And 15% responded, Could you repeat the question? The correct answer, of course, is Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Many Americans think of Canadians as beer-swilling, hockey-playing, toque-headed, parka-wearing moose-hunters, whose favorite food is a beaver tail pastry, covered in maple syrup. In reality, only a small minority of Canadians are moose hunters. Most prefer to hunt caribou. The true picture of Canada is much more nuanced and includes Royal Canadian Mounties officiating curling matches on floating pack ice.
The sad truth is that most Americans know next to nothing about our next-door neighbors to the north. Time to set the record straight. Here are seven widespread myths (only two of which I’ve been spreading) about Canada and Canadians.
… with an elephant. I would put it right up there among the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had to endure, tied with having a root canal or listening to a life insurance sales presentation about the benefits of whole life versus term. Recently, I had a colonoscopy. It’s one of those milestone events in life that apparently you’re supposed to do every few years once you hit 50, like starting to think about retirement planning, only a lot messier and more humiliating.
If you have never had a colonoscopy, let me give you a preview of what you’re in for. It’s no fun. They call it a “minor procedure.” But there’s nothing minor about it if you ask my colon. A doctor shoves a 142-foot tube called an endoscope up your butt to check out your insides. Essentially, it’s the same as the Roto-Rooter guy, but without the clipboard and baseball cap, and in this case, the backed-up pipe they’re inspecting is your intestinal tract. And this is one serious tube they insert. I am not completely sure of the exact route the endoscope took inside me, but I believe it included a side trip to my spleen before moseying to take a peek at my left ear canal.
Most qualified colonoscoptologists (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what they prefer to be called) will take careful safety measures to ensure they don’t jam the tube in so far that it might come out a facial orifice. Avoid any doctor who refuses to make that assurance. Before last week, if you told me that I was going to voluntarily succumb to allowing a complete stranger to stick a tube the length of a basketball court up my back side and take pictures of my interior (probably to post on Facebook), I would have laughed my ass off. Perhaps I should have rephrased the previous sentence.
America is a nation obsessed with its cars, especially us males. Ever since my Y chromosome muscled out that wimpy second X one, I was pre-destined to fixate on buying my next car. Since college, I have owned eight cars, and every one of them has taught me a valuable life lesson. (Click on the links below to see exact replicas of each car I owned – down to the color.)
My Volvo (1968 model year) taught me a lesson in humility. A guy I knew in college dared me to a drag race on a stretch of highway. He had a Corvette. It did zero to 60 in 5.2 seconds. My six-year old Volvo did zero to sixty, well… eventually. By the time I reached the finish line, the other dude was in a different zip code – mocking me from afar. A humbling experience. Volvo has always had a reputation for building safe cars. After my humiliation, I could only conclude it must be because few Volvo owners ever have enough time on their hands to attain dangerous speeds above 20 mph.
My Chevy Malibu (1973) taught me about Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I received a firsthand education on the complexity of automobiles and just how many different components could break down, including the antenna, the door lock, the radio, the non-electric windows, and the clock – and that was just on my test drive. And I also learned that not all car horns sound the same. When my horn died (who knew car horns died?) the repair shop apparently found a replacement horn by stealing it from a pink Schwinn bicycle previously owned by a six-year old girl.
Won’t you please help? Millions of dollars are spent every year on life-threatening illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and restless leg syndrome. But precious little is being done about a chronic, as yet incurable condition that frankly, most people are not comfortable talking about. I’m talking about UHS.
If you’re like many women, you probably think it stands for Ugly Husband Syndrome (which afflicts roughly half of all marriages after 15 years). If you live in Arizona, perhaps you think it stands for Unregistered Hispanic Syndrome. If you’re my teenage daughter, your guess might be Unbelievably Hideous Handbag Suckiness Syndrome (my daughter is not good with acronyms). But you’d be wrong. I’m talking about an actual medically diagnosed and thus far untreatable condition called Uncombable Hair Syndrome. Yes, there actually is such an affliction. It even has its own web site.
What exactly is UHS? This silent killer (of any hopes for a social life) usually presents itself between the ages of 3 months and 12 years and typically results in thick, frizzy, light-colored hair which simply will not respond to combing.
So the next time you see a slovenly teenage boy who looks like a complete toad, with his over-sized pants hanging down around his knees, shoelaces untied, a tattoo of a snake slithering through the eye socket of a skull on his left arm, and unkempt hair flopping about all over the place, don’t be so quick judge. He just might have UHS. Underneath his sliced-up Judas Priest T-shirt and nipple ring, he might be crying silent tears (from the pain of the nipple ring). Give him an understanding nod, and while you’re at it, a hat.
If you ask me, springtime is synonymous with yard sales. All over America, moms are clearing out their overstuffed closets, getting rid of old, worthless junk. And I’m not just talking about their husbands lying on the couch drinking beer and watching the Poker Channel.
