Monthly Archives: December 2016

December 28, 2016 · 1:24 am

Life’s Sinful Pleasures

Today was a good day, I spent part of it watching a Blue Bloods marathon, another part organizing the cans in my cupboard and then there was the part where I ate…whatever I wanted….whenever I wanted.I got started on this train of thought when I read about the group that is encouraging people to talk about little weird things that they like…kind of a reverse little things that annoy you. So, I began thinking about all the weird little things that others might find annoying, but that I really like. I’ve got a few.

For instance, I love cheese. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to eat cheese, but I’ve never been able to walk by a block of cheese in the stores and it’s even worse when it’s in one of those round cylinders. The truth is, though, that I don’t just like cheese, which is bad enough for you. I love to eat cheese with Lays potato chips. Frequently, I can be found taking a bite of cheese and then a potato chip, luxuriating in the heavy dairy and heavy salt mix. I’m reminded of Mrs. Potato Head, who hides in her pantry to indulge her secret (and cannibalistic for her) pleasure. I don’t eat my cheese and chips in a closet, but I have been known to eat them crouched behind the kitchen counter so no one can see me from the windows.

Another of my weird enjoyments is the plastic bubble wrap that comes in packages. I LOVE to pop those little pockets of air and listen to the sound they make. My saddest day so far is when they began using those plastic wraps with the giant pillows of air. They are difficult to pop and not nearly as satisfying. Now, people may like popping lots of them at once, but not me, I like things to drag out longer, so I’m very meticulous about popping a row at a time and I’m not very happy if someone had popped some for me.

Now, when I’m popping these plastic wraps and eating my chips and cheese, I love to watch Blue Bloods. I watch marathons of the show on cable channels or on my own DVDs (yes, I’ve collected all seasons). I don’t watch it because of the exciting drama or the fact that Donny Wahlberg can outrun any criminal. I watch it for the family dinners. Those family dinners have more drama than a night on Broadway and I love it! Once the family dinner is over, I’m really not that interested in how they solve the current legal problem, I’m just bummed that Sunday dinner is done. (They have some fabulous meals as well.)

Another weird thing I enjoy is the fact that on Facebook, they are always putting out a math problem or a visual problem or a grammar or vocabulary problem on the timeline. I am addicted to these: I work like anything to make sure I come up with the right answer and it drives me crazy that they frequently don’t give the answers. It’s like asking someone to marry you, but never coming up with an answer. Answer provided or not, I can’t resist taking the quizzes, so I hope they keep them coming.

So now I ‘ve talked about some of the weird little things that not only don’t make me crazy, but that I truly enjoy. So I suppose you’re wondering why I mentioned arranging cans in the cupboard. Well, that’s another weird thing I enjoy: making statements like that to make people think I am somehow uncontrollably neat when I’m actually uncontrollably sloppy! Have a happy week, folks, I’m off to eat some cheese and chips!

The Little Joys of Winter

I’ve given this a lot of thought lately and I’ve decided that when God thought about punishment for bad behavior, that is when he thought up winter. And lately, I’ve been leading a pretty sinful life apparently, because all of the joys of winter are upon us!

I don’t want to say that I’m sick of snow already, but…okay, I’ll say it: I’m sick of snow already! It’s bad enough when it snows and then the sun shines, but when you go through days and days of continual flakes flying and just enough to mess up the roads—heaven forbid we should get a snow day or something—it becomes a showy snowjob!

I hate shoveling more than anything. I can bundle up all I want, and something always freezes before I have transferred the layer of snow on the sidewalk into a pile on the lawn. Usually, I have my chest wrapped in fourteen sweaters and my neck and shoulders are sweltering in the scarves and I am wearing, but I have never figured out how to keep breezes out. There is always a trickle of cold air sliding up one sleeve or snaking around one cold ankle and up the pantleg. Then there are my hands, which are either warm and stiff in enough layers of gloves, or cold because I need to move my fingers to shovel.

The worst part has happened since I got glasses. If I wrap myself up well, I am always blowing warm breath on my glasses and eventually, I have such a layer of ice on the lenses that I can see better if I take them off! If I avoid wrapping my face so tight, they do their ice-over routine in the house. In desperation, I went out shoveling one time without them and ended up shoveling a nice, crooked path across the lawn!

Winter diseases have struck as well. If someone isn’t coughing up a lung in line behind me, someone manages to throw up during a noon-day lunch. These diseases are so friendly, they always want to spread their germs around! It’s inevitable that about the time the first cold weather strikes I get the cold that just won’t end and of course, like a good wife, I share it with Roy. After a while we are both popping Vitamin C like drug dealers and the evenings are full of so much coughing we sound like a chorus for some weird, hacking opera. Take my advice, don’t buy tickets for a performance!

In our house, winter is also the season when things fail. The rule is that the colder and the darker it is, the more likely it is that something will fail. Now, I can’t even begin to tell you all the joys of having a sewer pump go out, but I can tell you that I have never had to help change one in the summer. The two I have been involved in replacing were both done on a late, cold January night, when we were attempting to keep the sewer from backing up into the basement.

There’s also the time when I froze my coat to the roof while trying to pour water into a vent to open it up. Beyond that the things most likely to fail are garage doors when a blizzard is blowing and you have to get out of the car to drag the door open, the snowblower, when the snow is piled up hip high or best of all, the furnace, when the weather has turned to subzero highs. All of these are joyous memories of winter and I wish I thought that those kinds of memories were behind me, but I don’t like the sound of the heaters in the basement and the doorbell has chosen this opportune season to retire.

Now, I know that you are all going to tell me that you don’t enjoy these winter weather blues any more than I do, but I know that someone out there must have truly misbehaved to get us to these snowy and really cold days. So as I wrap myself in three blankets and pop cough drops like peanuts, I would like to ask all of you: can’t we just behave ourselves? Then maybe God will bring spring on earlier this year!

© Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In the Well, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jackie Wells-Fauth and Drops In The Well with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Up on the housetop, reindeer pause; out jumps good old…Santa Cat?

It’s that time of year, folks. The time of year when I must enter the annual battle between the pets in the house and the Christmas decorations. Anyone who has pets knows exactly what I’m talking about here. Animals, who lay on, crawl through or knock over any Christmas decoration that impedes their path and owners who pull out their hair as they try to rescue the bulbs, lights, statuary, greenery, ect. which hit the deck under furry paws.
I never worried about this in the days BDC (Before Dogs and Cats.) But it began with our first housedog, Patch, who was fascinated by the Christmas tree. She would shove her doggy nose against the bulbs and she apparently didn’t like what she saw because she would bite those glass Christmas bulbs until they popped and glass scattered everywhere. I would hear a glass ball explode and race to the living room in time to see her delicately spitting the shards out of her teeth.

“You’re gonna die if that stuff gets in your innards,” I would threaten, but she was unaffected. She would simply turn back to the tree, selecting her next victim. She is the reason I learned to put the stuff on the bottom that I really didn’t care about.

The next dog we got, Ammie, was much more interested in the texture of the artificial tree. For some reason, she felt the most inward portions of the tree were best, so I would have the thrill of walking into the living room and watching the tree doing a crazy, drunken dance because Ammie was under it, chewing on the under branches.

Our current dog has continued the Christmas “dance with disaster.” She is particularly fascinated with anything wooden (those ornaments are now at the top). In addition, flashing colored lights have a bad effect on her. She barked non-stop for the first two weeks after I hung the flashing lights in the window last Christmas and then she solved the problem by chewing the whole string in half. I told her that if there was any justice, her eyes would have lit up like the Christmas lights, but apparently, there is no justice for this, because she survived her electrical Russian roulette.

Cats are much more likely to climb the tree, but in my house, they quickly decide that the Christmas scarf under it is their own private bed. Hosmer, the cat we have now, cannot be stopped. I’ve put things in front of the tree and presents where she wants to lie. She merely cleans things out and lays there anyway. She also likes the nativity barn and has never heard that there was no room at the inn, because she has been known to push out the Christ child so she can lay inside.

Gifts are another issue, since I have learned not to put them under the tree. The cats will claw anything soft open. I awoke one morning to see the cat peacefully sleeping on a pillow I had handmade for my mother, the shreds of the paper wrapping surrounding her on the floor. The dog was even worse, since one year I awoke to find a half dozen presents torn open and a box of chocolates (which had been wrapped in plastic as well as wrapping paper, open and gone. She had smelled the candy and torn through the gifts until she found it. I suppose I could consider myself fortunate that she found it after destroying only half a dozen gifts!

Any hopes that I had that this year would be calmer have been destroyed already. The cat has succeeded in crawling over a line of ceramic Old World Santas to take up her regular abode under the tree and the dog has already knocked over the large ceramic camel and two wise men in my nativity set. A star appeared in the east and the wise men came, but they reckoned without the giant dog who knocked over their camels and sat on the Christ child! Everyone have fun putting up your decorations and have a joyous season!

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Life’s Sinful Pleasures

The Little Joys of Winter

Up on the housetop, reindeer pause; out jumps good old…Santa Cat?

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta