THIS n THAT

 

On my computer desktop I have a black sidebar on which headline news is reported. 

Right now I see 15 or so headlines.  The headline is in white print; the newspaper name and how long ago it was reported is in turquoise print.  My thinking about putting it there was that I could quickly see when important things make news.  I figured it would be a helpful gadget to have handy.  That’s all well and good, but sadly, what I see 80% of the time is headlines about entertainment personages.  I admit to being one of those grinds who couldn’t care less about such personages.  Just now when I sat down at the computer I read that Jamie Lee Curtis is home from the hospital.   I find that this headline comes from comes from the Pakistani Times. 

I’m glad to know that she’s ok, but what’s this PAKISTANI TIMES newspaper headlines and why am I getting news from them?  Not that it’s a sinister plot or anything, but getting one’s news from Pakistan instead of USA Today? Very strange, I think.

 

However, I do like these various little gadgets.  I have a Scratch Pad gadget, where one click will produce a drop-down box where I can write a note to myself.  I also have a nice white square on which a virtual black widow spider walks around.  I can use my cursor to block where she goes and to make her back up – IF I WANT TO!   I don’t play many games on the computer, so I consider my gadgets as play things.  And stress relievers.  Nothin’ relieves stress like pushing a black widow spider around!

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In our little apartment we have a tiny room at the end of the kitchen that we call a pantry, although it’s really more of a storage room.  We chuff everything we can in there, from canned food to Dust Buster, to cat litter box, to crock pot, food processor, vacuum cleaner attachments, rags, and feather duster,   We installed lots of shelves for storing all this stuff, and of course all food items are appropriately stored in Tupperware containers.

Early yesterday morning while I was sitting on the couch having my first cup of hot coffee, Jerry went into the kitchen to fix his breakfast.  I was watching the 5:30 a.m. news and not paying much attention to what he was doing.  I heard a distant clatter and then a huge “thunk” and swoosh emanate from the kitchen.  An expletive followed.  I jumped up from the couch and ran in to see what happened – and I found Jerry staring ankle-deep in Wheaties.  He looked at me and said “Something in the pantry fell on the floor and it startled me.  I dropped the Wheaties.” The whole top of Tupperwear container had been knocked off and Wheaties flew everywhere!

 

At that point I burst into laughter.  My poor husband, standing in his robe and slippers amid a floor covered with from end to end with Wheaties.  It was such a sight and he looked so pitiful.  And “startled” was the word that made me start laughing.  I have never in 38 years of marriage seen him startled over anything; nothing ever surprises him, much less startles him.  But good man that he was, he crunched his way back into the pantry, grabbed the broom and dustpan and cleaned up his own mess.  Me, I went back into the living room, sat on the couch and laughed and laughed. 

Poor Jerry.  He discovered it was a vacuum cleaner tool – a little plastic crevice cleaner - that had clattered down onto the floor.  I didn’t tell him that I had placed it atop the Dust Buster the previous day; I had seen it was a rather precarious place to put the tool, but my hands were full and I couldn’t remember where it was when I picked it up, so that seemed as good a place as any to set it.  Obviously it wasn’t!

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Last evening about 7 p.m. I walked into the bathroom and heard a strange noise coming from…the pipes?  the apartment next door?  It was quite loud and sounded as if it was something that had just been turned on.  I turned the water faucets on and off, and flushed the toilet hoping to discover the source of the noise.  I stepped one foot in the bathtub and listened to its back wall.  The sound was still very loud but that wasn’t the source. 

By this time Jerry had come into the bathroom to listen.  He moved into the bedroom to investigate and I decided to check the water pipes in the kitchen.  I could envision a broken pipe and having to evacuate the premises while plumbers hunted all night for a leak, but the noise seemed to be coming from the pantry.  Since the pantry abuts not only our bathroom wall but also the corner of 3 other apartments, I hoped I would find that the noise was someone else’s problem, not ours.  But when I walked into our pantry I could zero right in on the noise: IT WAS COMING FROM OUR DUST BUSTER.   The dumb thing was running at full force while it was hanging on the wall in its cradle.  I turned it off, of course.  When the sound stopped Jerry and I met in the kitchen and tried to figure out what had happened. 

 

We don’t know, and we’re not wasting any time trying to figure out.  It was just a very strange thing for this little machine inadvertently to have been involved in two separate incidents in one day.  And we consider ourselves very lucky that the problem was ONLY a Dust Buster and not a pipe.