Category Archives: Humorous Column

It was both frustrating and puzzling. I looked three times in the bread box, twice in the refrigerator and several times in the bathroom, but I could not find that partial loaf of bread anywhere.

I knew I had put it on the counter. The trouble is, I have found things that I knew I had set on the counter in such places as the bedroom dresser, behind the television in the living room and inside the dryer(don’t ask). I know it is possible for me to hold something in my hand that I intended to put in a particular place and have it never reach that spot. Instead it will end up in some bizarre place and I can’t begin to explain why I put it there.

I know what you’re thinking by now, “Oh, the poor woman, she’s developing Alzheimer’s Disease.” (I hope I spelled that right…I can never remember how to spell the disease that describes losing the memory). You might be right, except that means I have been developing this disease since I was very young.

I honestly believe that instead of suffering with this heartbreaking memory loss, I am suffering from something that I like to call “I put it where it belongs, but the darn Gremlins keep moving it.” When my daughters were young, I used to be able to blame them when the newspaper ended up in the silverware drawer or the roll of toilet paper I intended to put on the holder ended up stashed in the pan cupboard.

Now, my daughters are grown and the only time I can blame someone else for moving things is when my grandsons come to visit.  They aren’t too bad, but the little stinkers are always leaving their coffee cups in some weird place.

Okay, okay, so it’s my fault that things are misplaced. It’s not REALLY my fault though. Can I be blamed when I am set to pour myself a glass of milk and suddenly the phone rings and when I finished listening to the riveting canned tirade by some candidate, I’ve completely forgotten the milk? So as I wander away, contemplating the political ruin of our nation, I have not a thought for the slowly curdling dairy product on the counter. More than one container of milk has hit the trash as a stinking, chunky mess in just such an encounter.

Now, what got me started on this line of thought? Oh, yes, I remember. Back to the missing bread. Now, the one thing you must know is that once I start looking for the lost, misplaced or forgotten item, I always find it. I have to get pretty creative sometimes in figuring out where it is, and I have a whole list of unlikely places to search, but I always get it back. Not so the bread.

I began looking in some VERY unlikely places. I inspected the inside of my footstool in the living room—sometimes I hide things from the dog there. I checked the car in the garage, because I had taken some things out there for school. In complete desperation I checked under the bed in the spare bedroom—it would take too long to explain why I chose to look there. However, suffice it to say there was no bread there, but when I remember it again, I’m going to need to take a dust mop to that incredibly dirty floor!

I was in despair. It wasn’t even that I wanted some bread, it was just that I KNEW I had put that bread on the counter and now it was gone. My lucky knack of finding things that I mislaid had finally let me down. Roy walked into the kitchen while I was standing in the middle of the floor, looking dejected.

“What’s the problem?” he wanted to know.

“I think I’m really losing it,” I answered sadly. “I had a partial loaf of bread; I was sure I put it on the counter and now I can’t find what I did with it.”

“Oh, that bread that was on the counter?” he waved a hand carelessly, “I thought that was spoiled, so I threw it in the garbage.”

The garbage. Great, now I have a new unlikely place to look when I’m missing something!

© 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.

I have mentioned before that I am a skilled professional when it comes to worry. Let me give you a small sample of how well I can worry. If you saw the first of the new Star Trek movies (and I’m a big fan), Chris Pine as a young James T. Kirk, arrives at the induction center for Star Fleet on a motorcycle. A passing worker admires the bike and so “Kirk” tosses him the keys and says, “It’s yours.” Really nice, right? Well, I have been worrying for years since that came out: how in the world did that worker ever drive that motorcycle when he didn’t have the title to it? I mean, did he just store it in the garage and admire it or did he run the risk of being caught on a motorcycle with no clear title? These things worry me.

That being the case, it’s a sure bet that any type of medical exam can put my worrying meter into overdrive. Especially since medical personnel, whether they are for the body, the teeth or even the eyes, feel compelled to explain what they are about to do…in worrisome detail.

I was thinking about this during an eye exam this week. The young assistant held up a wicked-looking device that kind of resembled a pipe wrench and announced, “Now, I need you to hold open your eye as wide as you can so I can tap the eyeball with the machine.”

My first reaction to that announcement was to take off my glasses, squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I could and cover them with my hand! The term “tap the eyeball” is not a good one for a woman like me who doesn’t wear contacts because I can’t touch my eye to put them in. Although I tried to hold my eye open, my eyelid was quicker than their machine every time. So the doctor decided they would try it a different way. “Now, I’m going to use a light to measure that eye pressure,” he told me. “But I need to put in these eye drops. Please hold your eye wide open so I can drop them in.”

A dentist is nearly as bad. They want to check those teeth and the wider you can open your mouth, the better. “I’m going to tilt the chair up so I can work on the underside of that tooth,” he will announce. What he doesn’t realize is that I have a problem with being upside down. I’m holding on to the chair, hanging my head down, trying to remember to hold my mouth open while he is saying things like, “I’m just going to give this tooth you say is sore a little tap. Tell me when it hurts.” Would snapping my jaws shut on his fingers be enough of an indication, do you think?

And of course, both the dentist and the doctor are masters of the shot. “I’m just going to thrust this needle up your nose and give you a shot. There will be a little sting.” Having a baby was a “little sting” compared to a shot up the nose!

By far the worst physical exam for a worrier like me is the colonoscopy. What a great procedure. “In preparation for this procedure, we would like you to drink this vile-tasting laxative in about a gallon of Gatorade. This will ‘cleanse the colon.” You know what they mean by that? They mean that you will defecate so much and so violently in so short a time that it will eventually drain from you in a liquid form which is unstoppable and will cause you to live on the toilet.

Now, when you’re done “cleansing the colon,” that is when the fun really begins. “We are now going to take this tiny camera on a stick and shove it up the bottom to look inside your colon.” I’ve been through this procedure. As horrible as the camera sounds, I can tell you that the preoperative poop fest is actually worse. And of course, when it’s over, they want to show you photos of the inside of your colon. I have never been curious as to what that looks like!

So maybe when I think about it, the whole “tapping the eyeball” really doesn’t sound that bad. It’s certainly a lot less worrisome than a camera which goes where no camera has been before. And that reminds me,  I still can’t stop worrying about what that Star Fleet worker is doing with the bike for which he has no title. It’s a stressful world!

I believe I have mentioned that I’m not exactly a clothes horse when it comes to high fashion. I have always gone with the theory that what I’m going to wear depends on what I have in the closet. I don’t care about matching or coordinates or what colors are most fashionable. I’m okay with all this. Those who have to look at me, however, have a bit of a different opinion.

I try always to sneak out and buy my clothes on my own. I might snag an unimaginative pair of black trousers on the sly or a new blouse of lovely shades of…tan, maybe. Usually I look at bargain racks only when I shop alone because I like to think that bargain racks are just what someone not of my size and taste in clothes left behind for me to buy! After all, someone has to buy the blouse with the peculiarly shaped violet flowers and the odd pleats in the back, don’t they?

So I should have seriously known better than to go shopping with two of my cousins who DO have some fashion sense…but I didn’t. Kristi and Gail both voiced the intention of doing a little clothes shopping, so I went along.

Kristi started it. I was busily perusing a rack in one corner featuring bland blouses and tepid trousers, all marked down, when she walked up.

“Look at this beautiful shirt,” she was holding up a frothy white blouse with beautiful blue trimmings in it.

“That’s beautiful,” I agreed. “But it’s much too large for you. That’s not your size.”

“No,” she responded, taking me by the arm and walking me towards the dressing room, “It’s YOUR size.”

Very well. I could try on the blouse just to make her happy. I wouldn’t have to actually buy it, right? I got into the fitting booth and did you know those things have an open top? I had never really appreciated that before, but I did on that day.

I noticed because before I had a chance to try on the first blouse, Gail had knocked on the fitting room door. “I found this really cute top on the bargain rack,” she announced and the blouse came flying over the door.

From then on, it was as though clothes were snowing in on my fitting room, blowing in over the top of the door. I was trying on more clothes than I could possibly afford or ever find the time to wear. I kept thinking the clerk would announce that we could only have so many shirts in the fitting room at a time, but when she finally knocked on the door it was to say, “Ma’am, your cousins sent me in with these zipper shirts; would you like black, blue or red or maybe all three?”

Watching them when I walked out to model anything was pretty entertaining. If they reared back, nodding slightly with a rather smug look on their faces, I knew that meant, “Oh, yeah, I was right. She can wear red without spontaneously combusting.”

If they were to purse up their lips and twist their facial features, I would be able to interpret that too. They were thinking, “Okay, that one looks like something she would choose. It has to go.”

At the end of the shopping excursion after having tried on enough clothing to cover the poor in a small country, I finally found a selection of clothes that only set me back about two weeks’ worth of groceries.

As we were leaving, I looked over the top of my many packages at my cousins. “What do you guys buy?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, we’ll go back later to get ours,” they said, avoiding each other’s guilty looks.

“Right,” I said. It’s okay, though; I’ll get even. When I get home, I’m going to dye all these colorful clothes tan!

© 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.

I love that new animated movie “The Secret Lives of Pets.” I wanted to see it so desperately that I made my husband take me…without any kids for cover. He wanted to rent a couple of fresh faced kiddos to make it look like we weren’t just going to that movie ourselves, but I made him go without an age escort.

It may have been an error, though. Because now I think he’s beginning to wonder what I do all day long on my summer break. He leaves the house for work each day just like the owners of the pets in the movies and then the pets get into all kinds of trouble all day instead of accomplishing anything.

Since we went to the movie, he’s been questioning me rather closely on my activities during the day. Now, this is bad, because not all of my activities in a day could be termed as “useful.”

He went to work one morning, inviting me to have a good day and adding, “There are some clothes that need washing and a couple of things to be straightened up in the family room. I presume you’re getting up now?”

“You bet,” I say, rolling over and burying my face in the pillow on the bed. “Anytime now.”

He has no choice but to leave it at that…after all, he can’t be late for work. But I know the inquisition as to what I have been doing will come when he gets home. I must in some fashion be ready for that.

That night, sure enough, the first thing he did when he came in the door was to ask, “Did you get those clothes washed?”

“Well, I started to, but I was interrupted and never got back to it,” I answered reluctantly.

“What interrupted you?”

“Well, I sat down for a few minutes and went to sleep,” I told him, “but I was just so tired from all the cleaning I did.”

“Oh, you did some cleaning?” he said, sounding more impressed.

“Yes, I cleaned the floor,” I said. “It was all sticky from the pop I spilled.”

“How did you spill pop on the floor?” he was suspicious again.

“I spilled it while chasing the dog,” I tried to explain.

“And why were you chasing the dog?”

“Because I had taken out my partial and when I looked down at her, she was wearing it in her teeth,” I answered. “And of course, after I cleaned the floor, it was necessary to spend a couple of hours sterilizing my partial.”

“So after that, you couldn’t get back to the laundry?”

“Absolutely, that’s just what I intended to do,” I hesitated.

“But?”

“Well, I was kind of tired after chasing the dog and cleaning the floor, so….”

“So you took another nap,” he shook his head as he walked away.

Now he’s a bigger believer in the secret life of deadbeats than ever before. And I’m so tired from trying to convince him otherwise, that I need another nap!

© 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.