CostcoWarrior

The UPS Guy 22 June 2006

Do you think it’s a requirement for UPS men to be hot?

I mean, our company’s UPS guy is hot.

And at every other place I’ve worked the UPS guy was hot.

And remember in Legally Blonde the hot UPS guy that the salon woman ends up with?

And I read a book last year where the main character couldn’t talk to her hot UPS guy for nervousness. (Her sister ends up setting them up…the book is The Shop on Blossom Street)

Do you think the first step to getting a job at UPS is to pass a hotness rating panel?

And how come you never hear about hot FedEx or DHL men? Is that where all the UPS hotness panel rejects get jobs?

The Summer of Gum 12 June 2006

As children, my mother had just a few absolutes when it came to rules. These were the few that had no bending room, and carried strict and immediate punishments.

Absolutely NO biting.
Absolutely NO spitting.
Absolutely NO gum.

Yep–when we squabbled, anything else was overlooked or wrapped in the whole “punishement for fighting”, but if you overstepped the biting or spiting lines, the fine print just killed you–you’d get immediate and double punishments–one for biting or spitting, and one for fighting. Even if you were winning the sibling rivalry, you totally lost the war if you used biting or spitting.

Amazingly, all 5 of us learned the 3 rules VERY young. And while we were very conscious and careful not to bite or spit, we all struggled with the gum rule.

GUM was forbidden.
GUM was messy.
GUM made you look like a cow chewing cud.
GUM got stuck in terrible places–your hair, the carpet, the furniture…
GUM was always relinquished from the collected halloween stash.
GUM was not allowed.

When I was 6, my family and I lived in a suburb of Houston Texas–completely elevationless, Houston is totally flat. Each of the 5 of us had our own bikes and we’d spend the days riding around the neighborhood, winning races, planning to ditch the younger riders, feeling badly about it and going back to show them how to get home, reading the funny mailbox numbers, having the greatest of childhood summers.

The whole neighborhood also fell in love with gum. It was the new craze. And it was still against mom’s rule. When you’re 6 and in hot, humid Houston, all you want is GUM in all it’s sticky fruity bubble-busting glory. All your friends chew it, and they can blow bubbles as big as their faces with the right kind. Just watching? Not being able to compete? No gum? This was a problem and it needed fixing.

Unknown to mom, I and two of the neighborhood girls one day decided to ride all the way to the supermarket to buy some gum. As we got within sight of the store, we realized two contingencies we hadn’t planned for: crossing the VERY busy intersection to the store, and actually paying for the gum. So we dropped the bikes to conference solutions in an empty lot still on the safe side of the busy road.

Daredevil that I was, there was no getting my scaredy-cat friends across the intersection. And we didn’t find any money on the ground to pay for the gum. But while searching for change, we found something even better…a goldmine of free gum. Yep, all the gum that people spit out on the ground? We noticed it for the first time. It was free. It was gum. We’d never have to ride far to get some. It even still had some good color to it–pink, green, red.

Face the busy intersection without any money? Or chew the gum from the sidewalk?

And at 6 we went with the gum from the sidewalk…

It wasn’t that bad, if I remember right. It was even fruity after we worked the stiffness out of it. Our jaws got some good exercise. And it made for The Summer of Gum.

A Spin Cycle 5 June 2006

When I was 8 we moved from Texas to Washington. We rented a 5 bedroom house that was really very large. There was even a large separate laundry room that had the washer, the dryer, the piles of laundry, the drying rack, and the utility sink. I wonder if my parents know how often we played in that room…

One day all five of us were goofing around in said laundry room. The washer and dryer were not in use, so they were used as our play things. We were big into making stuff up, and I think that day the washer was a space ship…we were opening and closing and climbing and standing and jumping in it, etc. My brother and I (9 and 8 years old) of course had to help the younger girls (7, 5, and 3 years old) climb in and out when it was their turn.

Soon we had moved to the dryer. I’m not sure what we thought the dryer was. Probably our escape route from some crazy martian planet. We took turns climbing in and falling out–it was a front load circular door dryer. In the midst of all the play, my brother and I figured out how to turn the dryer on, which made for GREAT fun, since when you turned it on, the dryer inside turned circles. So we played around for a while putting shoes and stuff in the dryer, watching them bounce around as the inside turned. And then we had The Idea. How fun would it be to turn around in the dryer ourselves? Just like spinning around the room, but around in the dryer?

My brother wanted to go first. So he climbed in and I tried to turn it on, but it wouldn’t start. He climbed out and we realized that it wouldn’t spin unless the door was closed. That was gonna be a problem, since none of us had been in there yet with the door closed. Hmmm. What to do? And then I, with all my innocence, suggested that my little sister Sarah (7 yrs old) try it—just get in and we’d close the door and then open it really fast…just to make sure nothing bad happened…

And she trusted me. Bad. Bad choice. We put her in and shut the door and turned it on and watched her spin and bump around in the dryer. It was So. Much. Fun. But she was screaming so we let her out after a few turns, crying and upside down and falling and scrambling out.

Surprisingly, none of us ever told my parents the dryer story. And not so surprisingly, my brother and I never could get any of the younger girls to play with us and the dryer again…