Cupcakes, College Football, and Celebrating Clint
We have arrived at my favorite time of year: fall is here, which means football season and the kickoff to lots of reasons to celebrate. September is my husband’s birthday month, and even though he doesn’t spend the entire month celebrating the way I do, we have enjoyed the better part of last week with some festivities, food, and fun. I love the celebrations that don’t include my getting any older.
As is his usual nature, Clint asked for some pretty practical gifts: a new wallet and a nail gun. It wasn’t until after he opened the nail gun that he informed me it was for a home improvement project which I have expressly forbidden, but we will discuss that another time (and find another use for his new power tool that doesn’t involve an addition to our house). Because I refuse to give only responsible birthday presents, I also gifted him a book about mezcal, the spirit similar to tequila that he has taken an interest in, and some tasting glasses and a couple of different bottles to taste and try as well. We used the occasion to change out of our lounge clothes into something more presentable and brush and comb our hair, and went out for a nice dinner to continue the festivities. I highly recommend it, as well as Clint’s preferred style of being back home by 9:00, playing Frisbee with the puppy in our dress clothes in the backyard (yes, we did).
I picked up a few of the cutest cupcakes for his big day. Birthday calories? No such thing.
Clint requested a nice steak dinner Wednesday for his actual birthday. We started with oysters, then filled up on steak for him, crab cakes for myself, and plenty of other deliciousness (which may or may not have included lobster macaroni and cheese).
I hope you get everything you wish for, Clint!
And here is our birthday boy, fast asleep on the couch by 9:45 p.m. I would blame it on his age, but he’s been doing that for at least the last decade.
As luck and the NCAA would have it, the weekend following Clint’s birthday was the Clemson versus Georgia Tech football game, also known as my alma mater against his alma mater. Our house divided. I offered to skip the game, but Clint said he welcomed the chance to be with our friends and tailgate again, as well as to see his Yellow Jackets play some football. I promised him the smack talk would be kept to a minimum and his choice of tailgate snacks and libations in honor of the occasion, and off we went to Clemson after last season’s COVID hiatus. We hadn’t been to a game since 2019, and there had been engagements, weddings, babies, relocations, new houses, new puppies and more to catch up on with some folks we hadn’t seen in quite a while. It was great to be back to our normal college football season routine again!
Here we are at the beginning of a very long game day. Go Tigers! Go Jackets! Go away humidity!
As requested, I set up a birthday Bloody Mary bar with plenty of fixings (our friend Bill lamented the only thing missing was crab legs, ha!). For fairness, I even set out some Georgia Tech napkins, which were largely unused. Go figure.
I couldn’t resist this hot sauce for a Clemson tailgate, though.
Cheers to another 45 years!
In the end, Clemson won, but a good time was had by all.
Saturday was full of humidity, more than one rain shower, and an hour and 52 minute delay of game due to lightning strikes in the area (yes, you read that right). It was a strange day, but we made the most of it. Now, the weekend has come and gone and I suppose the celebrating is over, although we have already moved on to getting our Halloween decor ready and planning and prepping for Clemson homecoming in less than two weeks. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.
Happy Birthday to Clint, one last time this year! Age is just a number; I’m always glad yours is a bigger number than mine. Thanks for keeping me young. Wink.
The Junk Drawer
Growing up, we called it the scissor drawer, a perfunctory name my mama gave it as the home of that most-sought-after item, the scissors. Of course, that drawer was home to many other objects that we crammed in there that otherwise wouldn’t have had a logical place to live, but the scissor drawer—known to most of you, I now know, as a junk drawer, was the reasonable place to store such valuables. Doesn’t everyone have a junk drawer? I like to think so.
I got curious for no particular reason if junk drawers were a Southern thing, and it tickled me to research and learn (the internet can be useful!) that people all over the place not only have these type drawers, they tweet, post, and brag about them and defend them with gusto. I found one man advocating a need for a junk drawer in every room of the house (seems a bit much, but to each their own), and one philosopher wisely pontificating that “Sometimes life is a junk drawer.” Truer words have never been spoken, ma’am. I’ll buy that t-shirt in a size medium.
Over the years, I have resisted my junk drawer. I’ve gone to the Container Store and bought caddies and organizers, I’ve straightened and tidied and fretted over it, because I am type A (plus) and I like to have a place for everything and everything in its place. But sometimes the place for things is: the junk drawer. Our drawer, no matter if it was in our first apartment right after we got married, our starter home where we lived for over a decade, or the house where we live now, has always been located in the kitchen. Maybe that’s why they say the kitchen is the heart of the home, because that’s where most of us have our junk drawer.
Besides the scissors (the captain of the proverbial ship), I feel that the drawer simply must contain some form of spare change, glue or adhesive, a tape measure or three, and then a good random smattering of objects as if someone smashed open a pinata of life right into the drawer. For our house, that includes my address book (I still use a real, paper one), note pads in every shape and size, pens that indicate what exotic travel we have accomplished in every locale from the local veterinarian to the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington, DC at least a zillion years ago, not to brag, but BRAG, and office supplies we have no doubt pilfered from Clint’s cubicle pre-pandemic. Phone charges abound, as do wallets, unopened mail on occasion, grocery lists I inevitably write and then leave in the drawer rather than actually carry to the store, a calculator, and other treasures and household necessities. It’s a junk drawer and a vault, to be honest.
I’ve straightened and organized it on occasion, but the junk drawer is chaos. That is its purpose.
I did come to a sort of dreaded realization last week that we have managed to accumulate not one, or two, but three of these type drawers in a row in our kitchen. This is alarming given that we have lived in our home for just two years now and have managed to reach a three-drawer level of junk, but I should have known it would happen. The real estate flyer when our house was for sale pointed out that the kitchen had two islands for “maximum storage.” Maximum storage, at least for my family, is a fancy way to say lots of junk drawers. We now have the standard issue scissor drawer, a drawer that has sprung up next to that which houses completely logical items for kitchen use such as extra birthday cards, face masks and filters, a selfie stick, a bouquet of dried flowers, and some pictures I have not gotten around to putting in a photo album as of yet. Move over to the last drawer in the island, take a deep breath, and experience the wonder of cocktail napkins. Funny napkins, holiday napkins, monogram napkins. Oh, and coupons and gift cards and takeout menus (most of which are expired and/or obsolete but still, inexplicably, linger like old memories in our drawer). Need a birthday candle? That drawer houses enough for someone turning 119, so you’re in luck. Our dog is 18 months old, but we still have all his puppy training literature, which is handy for something, I’m sure. Yes, junk drawer #3 is a real treasure trove.
We are definitely capping the number of junk drawers at a maximum of three.
I realize I’m being braggadocios about my three junk drawers. It’s probably giving you envy if you are just a single junk house, isn’t it? Or maybe (gasp!) you don’t have a drawer where you store all your old batteries, masking tape, thumb tacks, spare keys, and rubber bands? Never fear. If you have a drawer, the internet will happily sell you a junk drawer starter kit, which goes to show you really can buy anything online these days. I could probably send you all this junk for free, but where’s the fun in that? Behold, the Junk Drawer Starter Kit:
For just $22.99 on Etsy, you can junk up a perfectly clean drawer!
The “handy” little kit says it is perfect for first time homebuyers, apartment renters, or college students and comes with some drawer filler like matches, batteries, scissors (duh), tape, a pen—although I would recommend a junk drawer minimum of no less than five pens or you will look like a novice, rubber bands, and a screwdriver. Ooh! Aah! Junk!
When I started writing this post, I was considering reducing the amount of junk we have accumulated, but what with junk starter kits for sale to the masses, I realize now that would be rude of me. Who am I to get rid of something that other people are having to do without? It would be ungrateful. You learn something new everyday, and so today I have learned to be appreciative of my junk drawer, er, drawers. Happy is the life filled to the brim with magnets, toothpicks, receipts, and a box cutter. It’s basically our time capsule of memories and meaninglessness, and that’s kind of what life is all about. Well, that and wondering how you accumulated so many birthday candles. Life is a junk drawer.
Quit Being Ugly
I know, I know, these are trying times and it seems that they have been for a while now. As if our pandemic circumstances weren’t enough to test a saint’s patience, it’s hotter than an egg on the hood of a Firebird (that one’s not mine; I read it somewhere and it was so accurate that it stuck with me and I simply had to put it to use). My newsfeed is filled with “expert” opinions on politics and vaccines and even hurricanes at this point, and I can’t bear to watch the news any more because it’s too stressful. My grandmother used to say, “the world has gone to hell in a handbasket.” I don’t exactly know what a handbasket is, but I think we’re there.
What is not helping our handbasket situation is this rampant run of ugliness we are doling out on each other. We are hot, tired, and mean and it seems our tempers are flared. Just yesterday when I was leaving Trader Joe’s, an employee sideswiped me with not one, but two grocery carts and didn’t so much as bat an eye. “Excuse me,” I said to this fellow in a state of buggy-bitten shock. He grunted and just went on his way. Cauliflower gnocchi bedamned, that deserves some sort of apology, sir.
I think part of it is that our masks, in addition to adding fuel to our ire, also give us a feeling of anonymity. We think we can act out because no one can really see our faces, so we can get away with a little more bad behavior behind that piece of cloth than we would if our full faces were in view. We are a tad emboldened behind that covering, aren’t we? And it’s making us act ugly.
You, under that mask, quit acting ugly.
I’m guilty, too. My mask deprives my brain of the oxygen I need to be patient and kind some days and that makes me extra snarky (you just can’t see my smirk, but it’s there). A few weeks ago, I hurriedly parked my car in a strip mall and headed towards a beauty appointment when a women approached me wringing her hands, fretting. I award her the trophy for World’s Worst Parker after seeing the caddy-corner, off-center, diagonal job she had done in the spot next to my car, and she explained that she was afraid she did not have enough room to get into her vehicle and asked that I move my car to give her some room. I was rushed and suffocated in the humidity under my face covering, plus I do not believe in being penalized because she was unable to park her Kia Soul in a proper manner. I told her that if I had sufficient room to exit my SUV, she should be just fine to enter her Kia. “So that’s it? You’re just going to leave?” she huffed? “Ma’am, you are either going to have to get better at parking or convincing people, but either way, I’m running late. Have a good one!” And I left. That was ugly, y’all.
So here we are, fed up and acting out, and being ugly to each other. I don’t think it’s making us feel better to vent our frustrations on our fellow humans, in fact, I think it’s making us feel worse about ourselves. We need, as my mama told my brother and I when we would rip the heads off each other’s GI Joe’s and Barbie dolls in fits of childhood rage, to quit being ugly.
But I didn’t just come here to talk about the problem. I’ve given it some thought and I have a few things we can do to turn ourselves around. We can quit being ugly and it’s not that hard. We need only to make up our minds that we can be prettier people—to ourselves and to each other, and it’s a simple process. Let’s take a deep breath (if that’s possible while masked up) and:
Don’t argue on social media. It’s a total waste of time. There are no experts on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. The real geniuses spend their time in actual think tanks or laboratories or high-level meetings, not furiously commenting “FAKE NEWS” or giving their unsolicited opinion on everything under the sun. It is possible to disagree with a post and just keep on scrolling without making your own views known, and it will free up your time to do other enjoyable things. Post pet pictures instead, get more likes. It’s win-win, really.
Go to Cracker Barrel. This one has it all. You can shop the Old Country store for virtually anything from old-fashioned candy to home goods to gift items, and then sit down for comfort food to take all the worry and cares of this world away. Who can argue with a mouth full of hashbrown casserole? Cast your cares into a bowl of dumplins and watch your mood improve. Is it considered ugly to tell someone to shove a biscuit in it, or is that just sage advice? It’s impossible to be angry at the Barrel, unless an uber competitive peg game breaks out at your table. Don’t you feel better? Of course you do. I feel better just thinking about it. Let’s go sit out front in the rocking chairs for a spell.
How many did you leave?
Write a thank you note. Notice I did not say a thank you text, those do not count. Get out some real paper and a pen, and if you still remember how, write in cursive. Thank someone for anything, everything, then seal that note up and put an actual stamp on the envelope and mail it to them. The funny thing is that, selfishly, not only will this make the receiver of the note all warm and fuzzy, you will feel good for doing this, too. Thinking about good things people do for you is like a hug, a real pick-me-up in the middle of all this messiness we are living in. It’s a really cheap form of therapy.
Watch some terrible television. I mean something guilty and just really bad. A friend recently confided that she enjoys Bachelor in Paradise because it is mindless and has beautiful scenery. I have stumbled upon the Vampire Diaries and you all already know I have been a Days of Our Lives aficionado since I was practically a toddler watching with my mom. My problems seem small when I realize I do not have an evil twin, suffer from amnesia, have never fall down an elevator shaft and been presumed dead, never been kidnapped and/or brainwashed…what a lucky, carefree existence I enjoy! Find some ridiculous programming and see if it can change or improve your point of view. After all, things may not be hunky dory where you are, but at least you are not Naked and Afraid, am I right? You bet your mosquito-free, underwear-covered heinie I am.
If all else fails, 24-hour Punch. I read about 24-hour Punch in Garden & Gun magazine last month and the entire article thrilled me to no end. I would be remiss not to share it with you, during this most trying of times, and to encourage all of you to bring punch and the spirit in which it ensues into your world. Read all about it, freeze yourselves up an ice ring, and get festive. If this won’t drown your sorrows, come over to my house because you’re doing something wrong and together, we will make it right, one ladle at a time. I’ll raise a drink to this link:
I don’t think I have ever made punch that didn’t result in a good party. It just doesn’t happen.
But please don’t take my word for it; test this theory for yourselves.
Surely this little to-do list is more than enough to keep us all out of ugly and back on good, pretty behavior again. If I see you at the Cracker Barrel and you need me to move my car, I will. But I’ll have to hurry so I can get home to watch another episode of Vampire Diaries, and you can write me a little thank you note for my troubles. I’ll whip us up a good strong batch of punch and we can toast to the fact that we’ve been weeks without a single social media argument breaking out. If all else fails, maybe you should just shove a biscuit in it (I say with love).
Ah, and I think to myself: what a wonderful world.