Desperate Bathroom Times Call for Desperate Measures

I was taught to behave like a lady; when it calls for it, I usually do.

This would include saying “Thank you” and not burping or passing gas in public unless it was absolutely necessary.                   

Ridiculously, I stand in line patiently waiting with hundreds of other women to use a 2-seater bathroom.  After 15 minutes, and not wearing Depends, one has to say, “This is stupid.”

I would have to surmise that most architects are men and they pay no attention to the number of women that must wait for the facilities, nor the time allotted to perform the same tasks a man would.  If the architect was astute, he would allocate triple the number of women’s stalls than men’s.

I attended a writer’s conference in Raleigh.  Most of the day was unmemorable, but the bathroom incident was not.

The line out the door was 20 women deep.  One woman behind me said, “I’m going to use the men’s room.”  She cautiously opens the door, “Anyone in here?”  There was no answer and she triumphantly held open the door saying, “If anyone would like to join me, I’ll watch the door.    

I imagined that she had been to numerous concerts and used the men’s room often.  I was so gullible, taken in with her commanding performance, so against my lady-like upbringing, I went in. 

“I’ll watch the door for you,” she said.

I go into the only one-person stall, shut the door and felt immediate relief.  Little did I know that she left the bathroom without telling me.

I came out of the stall to wash my hands and a man was standing at a urinal.  He turns to look at me and I think I’m going to die.  I immediately go back into the stall and brace the door.  I wait.  Poor man, he probably burst his bladder peeing so fast.

Then he leaves before washing his hands.  Even worse, lunch is in 45 minutes!

Imagine the scuttlebutt in the hallway and the man identifying me to others, branded for the life of the workshop.

I come out of the stall and the strange woman re-enters. “He had to go, so I left.”

“I guess I should watch for you,” I said.  Five seconds later, I left.  Turn about and all that…

May all your conferences be filled with adequate toilets.  Email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com.

Have a great day.

Sounds like Valentine’s Day

Sometimes I get distracted with all the things I need to do and end up doing things at the last minute. 

Before special holidays or birthdays come around, I spent hours thinking about the perfect gift to give.  

This year’s Valentine’s Day came too fast and I was unprepared.  My last option was to visit Wal-Mart.   Going there showed the desperation I felt; the parking lot is beyond chaos, the lines are excessively long and the selections are always picked over. 

I was determined to buy a card.  I never buy a card- I don’t find just the right one and feel like I’ve wasted too much time.  This year the card would be part of Scott’s gift; he wouldn’t expect it, so great.

I found 2 cardboard kiosks of cards near checkout lane number 52.  In kiosk number 1, the only Valentine ’s Day cards left were to Mother-in-laws.  I went to the other side and saw two funny cards for husbands.  I bent over and instantaneously heard, “Bbbffffffff”.

I popped up thinking, I didn’t fart, so who did? 

Two feet from me, in a shopping cart was a three-year-old boy practicing fart sounds; he made the best whoopee cushion imitation.  The mother realized what happened and said, “Timmy.”  I guess I smiled.  I think she was also looking for the perfect Valentine’s Day card.

I didn’t find what I was looking for, so I went to the second cardboard kiosk.  Again, there were plenty of Mother-in-law cards but nothing else.  I rounded the corner and thought I saw the perfect card.  

I bent down to the bottom tier and as fate would have it, “Bbbfffffff”, made me jump up.  I almost split my pants.  It was the same little boy.  This time, the mother didn’t even notice me or admonish Timmy, and I wasn’t smiling this time.

Enough! I grabbed the card and decided not to stick around for a third pass.

May all your shopping days be “Bbbfffffff”-less.

I'd love to hear from you, please email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com

Wings and Legs

I don’t obsess on many things but I am overly curious.  Since the Super Bowl this year, I’ve been thinking about chicken wings, a lot. 

I have questions.  For instance, when you order “wings,” why does the plate also come with baby legs? And why are the little legs called “drumettes”?  

Can you drum with them, and wouldn’t that look stupid?

I’ve also been thinking about the kinds of chickens I buy and the sizes of their parts. 

I went to Lowe’s Foods yesterday to get some rotisserie chicken at the deli counter, and asked for white meat. I got a ¼ chicken piece with the breast and the wing, where the wing was ½ the size of the breast.   It was large enough to, well, fly.

Then I looked at what would be the dark meat portion. The thigh and leg parts were huge.  I could almost envision the chicken running for his life on that leg.

I suppose if you put all these parts together, you’d come up with a hefty bird.

Then I walked around the corner to the party foods and there they were, barbecue wings on a platter.  Interesting.  These parts were miniatures compared to the other chicken I saw. 

Where did they come from?  There were so many midget parts that they had to be another kind of chicken, midget chickens.

But, what happened to the rest of the chicken?  Were the chickens so tiny that the good parts were only fit for “wings”?  I’m sure they couldn’t fly or run very well.

Then again, maybe midget chickens are related to “boneless” chickens.  

It’s hard to imagine a genetic deformity that farmers want in their chicken coops, but they have to be easier to round up. 

For me, this whole subject falls into the category of “mystery meat.”  You know, the stuff you got from the school cafeteria, which was chopped, pressed and came in a gray color. 

Mystery meat covers a lot of territory.  Maybe this mystery meat is something I shouldn’t be so curious about.  Perhaps I should become a vegetarian.

I'd love to hear from you.  Email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com

Salad, anyone?

Well not EGGactly...

I tend to be challenged in the kitchen.  Scott would say that was an understatement.

I can do a few things right in the kitchen.  According to Scott, I can cook perfect bacon, and apparently that’s the only perfect thing I do. 

I can also make quiche, which might be a kind of passé thing in the culinary world today.  I can also open a can of soup and heat it, and then I’m pretty good at making PB& J or grilled cheese sandwiches.  I can also boil an egg and make toast.  The toast might have a few charred edges but Mother always said to scrape it off and eat it anyway.

The Cape Carteret Garden Club had its annual card party fundraiser.  Every person in the club makes food and sets up a smorgasbord for the players.  The players pay a nominal fee and then have a great time playing cards for hours after a great lunch.  I’ve even seen them play for money; the Bunco squad might be raiding us next time.

I volunteered to bring egg salad sandwiches, fruit and a raffle item.  I decided on orange slices because I couldn’t mess that up, and the raffle item would be my humor book with a few other things thrown in.  The egg salad sandwiches should have been a piece of cake.  I was wrong.  Apparently, the moon was in the right house for egg salad sandwiches, and I was in another one.

I decided to use the food processor.  I cleaned up all the cobwebs, dust and dead bugs before beginning; my dogs had a sneezing fit.  It was the wrong appliance for the job and it took two dish washing cycles to get off all the salad stuff.

I had 18 eggs, 1 loaf of long bread, mayonnaise, pickle gherkins and spices ready to go.  While the eggs were cooking, I chopped the pickles, added a touch of mustard, a little onion and garlic powders and salt and mayonnaise in the processor.  It did its thing and I was so pleased that the machine would be my helper today.

I tasted the sauce, there was too much salt in it.  No worries, by the time the eggs and more mayo were added it would be great.  The eggs cooled down and were chopped into chunky bits, then added to the sauce with the last of this jar of mayonnaise. 

Holy cow, it wasn’t egg salad, it was something from the Dead Sea. 

 It needed more mayo.  I found a new jar in the frig, opened it, looked at it, tasted it, and then read the expiration date: June, 2012- that one had expired 7 months ago.  I retrieved another new jar of mayonnaise and saw the expiration date was April, 2012- they both got tossed. 

Now, I’m out of eggs, mayonnaise and pickles.  What to do?  In my puny culinary brain, I seemed to recall that potatoes can be used for removing salt.  It couldn’t hurt, so I peeled and sliced a small potato, patted it dry and stuck them in the salad; the bowl was covered and placed back in the frig.   Ten seconds later Scott enters the kitchen.

“Hi Ma, how was your day?”

“Well I’m trying to make egg salad sandwiches for the card party, and it’s not going too well.”  I thought I heard a snort.  “I’ve run out of pickles, and gone through 3 jars of mayonnaise, 2 that expired and I think I’ve over salted the eggs.  Right now, I don’t have egg salad.  We’ll have to stop at the grocery store later on so I can finish it.”

Scott didn’t argue, just smiled and agreed.  At the store, I bought non-expired mayo, more pickles, 2 dozen eggs (just in case), and an extra loaf of bread- with my luck the other loaf had expired too.

I was determined to use all the sauce with the new boiled eggs, so I mixed it in small quantities.  Surprisingly, my concoction worked and instead of only making egg salad for one long loaf of bread, the 3 dozen eggs, 4 jars of mayo, 2 jars of pickles, and spices filled 2 long loaves of bread and a small container.  

Rather than a cheap batch of sandwiches, they cost $31.65.   

I could have ordered subs for that price.  Next time, I'l just donate money to the cause.      

The sandwiches turned out pretty good, and no one got sick from them.  This time.  

I'd love to hear about your kitchen challenges.  Email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com.

I hope your day is full of great sandwiches.                                                                                                                                                      

Cry For Chicken Wings

I’ve heard that there is a great shortage in chicken wings these days.  

Really?

I haven’t seen a shortage of breasts and thighs, so what’s so special about the wings and drumettes that warrant a shortage?  I always thought of these as 2^nd class chicken parts.

There are 2 wings and 2 drumettes per chicken and someone had to find a way to use all the parts, right?  The beaks and feet are already spoken for our soups and Chinese cuisine, so the logical choice is to make them the poor man’s snack attack pack.

Why else would Domino’s Pizza sell them?

Wings are perfect for little fingers and big mouths.  It’s a “finger lickin’ food just perfect for snack time, or anytime”.  Sounds like a jingle I heard when I was young.

With the supply and demand mentality, the shortage of wings, means the price just jumped to about $2.00 a pound, making them more expensive than chicken breasts or even a small ribeye steak. 

Recently, there was a massive heist of 65,000 pounds of wings, but the thieves were thwarted.  Hallelujah.   I suppose they were banking on selling them to the local pubs stocking up for the Super Bowl. 

 Hey mister, do I have a deal for you.

I wonder what the police did with 65,000 pounds of chicken wings?  They can’t sit in a cardboard box with other evidence.  Did they rent a freezer or did the evidence go missing?  

By the time the case is called, will the wings have to make an appearance in court, and can the owner actually sell 3-year-old chicken when he gets them back?

With our new food shortage, I can imagine that there will be a new surge to produce the next snack food suitable for children and adults, something like fried frog legs…or not. 

I'd love to hear about your favorite snacks and if you had wings for the Super Bowl.   Email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com

It's a great day for a wing or two.

The Bathroom, the Newest Media Craze

Let’s face it, the public bathroom holds a captive audience.


Unless the bathroom is nasty or smelly, the opportunity for marketing businesses is extraordinary.


One genius is ADSINYOURHEAD.COM.


The name of the business brings a smile- it’s so appropriate. They feature several 8x10 advertisements in Plexiglas slots, with a few business cards placed on a wall or the back of a stall’s door.


I’m sure you’ve read something like this. After all, you probably had the time to peruse them.


The businesses must be benign enough to merit door space, and I’m sure that in a busy restaurant, the dollars spent on advertisement brings more “buck bang”.


I just coined that phrase and any business wanting to use it must pay some royalties- see, I’m thinking like a business….


I envision that paper ads will eventually morph into more technological entities. WIFI, Fox or CNN news tickers will be expected for up-to-date news information.


Then, what? The demand will overflow to businesses where work propaganda will fill employee heads, or perhaps one could earn another degree there…


The door’s the limit.


Sadly, in the public bathroom, you’re not alone. “Big Brother” may not be watching but the advertisers are.


I'd love to hear your bathroom story... send me an email at aitken.helen@gmail.com


Have a wonderful day.

Catalog Queen

I love catalogs.

I love to read them, wish for things,and laugh at the items made specifically to taunt that brother-in-law of mine.

I only know of one other person that receives more catalogs, my Mother-in-law.

She has special boxes for them, and they line the bottom of her bookcases.

The boxes keep things organized, but deep down, she relishes them like leather bound, signed first editions.

Think of the most obscure, outrageous and expensive kinds of catalogs on earth, and she has it.

When I visit her, I gather the latest ones, spread out on the floor and spend hours drooling.

Does she order from them? Single handedly, she keeps the catalog economy afloat.

She is my catalog guru.

When she comes to visit me, she doesn’t ask to see my catalog selections.

Like Obi wan and Darth Vader, she is the Master and I am the apprentice.



Do you like to peruse catalogs like me? It's the best window shopping in a recliner I know.

I'd love to hear your catalog favorites. Email me at aitken.helen@gmail.com or go to
Helen Aitken on Facebook.

May all your days be catalog wishing days.