Treasure To Trash

Ann: My aunt just called. She’s pretty upset. She just found out something that’s nearly put her into shock.

Pam: This sounds like a juicy one…tell me.

Ann: You know my aunt loves garage and estate sales. She hits the door at six in the morning with the local ads in one hand and a map in the other. She considers it a treasure hunt.

Pam: So she’s the one who always gets there Friday morning and buys up all the old paintings with an original copy of the US Constitution hidden in the frame, isn’t she?

Ann: That’s her.

Pam: Thanks to her, all I can find is mismatched Tupperware and broken ashtrays by the time I get out there on Saturday at lunchtime.

Ann: Well a couple of years ago she found a treasure she was so proud of. She was the first customer at an estate sale in the older, historic area of town. She spotted this beautiful, very unusual ceramic vase with a little top. She was tickled that the price tag said only twenty dollars and then she was still able to talk the guy down to just eighteen.

Pam: I’m surprised he budged on the price that early in the day.

Ann: Me too. So she drove around town with it while she hit the other sales and when she got home she realized it had tipped over in the back floorboard of her car. There was some old, musty potpourri in it so she took it out back and dumped it in her garden. Then she washed out the vase and vacuumed up the carpet in the car.

Pam: So where’d she put her new prized procession?

Ann: Right in the middle of the dining table. Over the past several years, every time she’d have a fancy dinner she’d use it as a centerpiece with the flowers of the season arranged in it. Then we’d all have to hear the story again about how she made this terrific find.

Pam: She’s a repeater, huh?

Ann: Yeah, she is. Well the last time we were there, my cousin who always suspected the vase was just a Wal-Mart special, cruelly suggested she have it appraised. He was sick of hearing the story of her big estate sale discovery and knew she’d never tell it again when she found out the vase was worthless. He convinced her to have it checked out by telling her she may need to increase her homeowner’s insurance to cover such a valuable piece.

Pam: Don’t tell me…she took it in and got her heart broken by some Antiques Roadshow ceramics snob telling her it wasn’t worth a dime.

Ann: Worse! When the guy turned it over to check the maker’s mark on the bottom he discovered a name and two dates instead. It turns out it was an urn!

Pam: You’ve got to be kidding! Didn’t you say it came with potpourri in it? Who on earth would put potpourri in an urn?

Ann: That’s the funny part. It wasn’t potpourri Thinking back, my aunt realized that what she thought was old musty potpourri was actually ashes. She’d dumped the remains of poor Harold L. Meggitt under the bushes in her back yard.

Pam: What’s even creepier is that you guys had all those dinners with that poor man’s urn as the centerpiece!


Ann: My aunt is so upset she’s beside herself. She told the appraiser to keep the urn, went home, threw away the hand vacuum she’d used to clean the carpet, and now she says she wants to sell her car!

Pam: Well if she had found out sooner she could have saved the ashes and made them into a real treasure. You know they take the ashes from human cremation and make them into diamonds now.

Ann: Oh please!

Pam: I’m serious. They take the ashes of your family member or pet and they put them under high pressure and turn them into gem stones. If your aunt had done that she’d have that treasure she was looking for.

Ann: You aren’t serious….they actually make jewelry out of your loved one? It’s an intriguing thought but I’m not sure how I feel about the idea.

Pam: Well, as the saying goes, a diamond is forever.

Ann: What ever happened to ‘death do us part’?

(For those of you who find this unbelievable, click on the photo below!)

Beach or Bust

Ann: I’m pretty bummed. Joe and I finally got our romantic seashore get-away and the beach was a total bust.

Pam: Well you said it was “beach or bust”. I guess you ought to set more flexible parameters next time. Did it rain?

Ann: A little. But the big problem was a subtropical depression offshore. The tide was so high there was absolutely no beach to walk on. The waves were actually lapping on the seawall.

Pam: Couldn’t pull off the old walking on water move, huh? Didn’t you tell me you had a balcony that opened onto the beach? Why didn’t you just open the door? At least you could hear the waves.

Ann: We did the first day. It was actually pretty funny. The wind off the beach was so strong it raced through the room blowing into one air vent and out the other. The whistle it made was so loud it drowned out the sound of the ocean.

Pam: Wow, that’s some wind!

Ann: You have no idea. At one point Joe was in the shower so I decided to go fill up the ice bucket. With the balcony door opened the vacuum pressure in the room made it impossible for me to open the front door to the suite. So I closed the balcony door and went out the front door to get the ice. While I was down the hall, Joe finished his shower and opened the balcony door again. Well, I couldn’t get back into the room! It was hysterical.

Pam: At least you knew no one was going to break in the front door as long as the balcony door was open. I’m sure the sound of the waves was really soothing.

Ann: It was for exactly one day. Then the wind changed direction and the smoke from all those wildfires was so thick we had to shut all the doors and windows. We might as well have been in El Paso for the beach time I got out of that trip.

Pam: If I know you and Joe, I’m sure you found other ways to entertain yourselves.

Ann: Of course. But I really need my beach time to unwind. Nothing in the world does it for me like a walk on the beach.

Pam: I wouldn’t tell Joe that little tidbit of information. It might hurt his self-image as a stud muffin.

That’s tough though. I’ve managed to develop my unwind activities right here at home. I either soak in the tub by candlelight and music or I work in the garden. Either of those will hit my reset button for me.

Ann: Forget a reset button. I need a ‘Control-Alt-Delete’!

Pam: Yeah, you’ve been through the wringer lately. And since absolutely none of it is self-inflicted, you have my sympathies. Is there anything I can do?

Ann: I don’t think so.

Pam: Why don’t you come pull some weeds in my flower garden? I’m sure you’ll feel better.

Ann: No thanks Tom Sawyer. What? You couldn’t offer me a soak in the jacuzzi?

Pam: Sure. Come on over. But I should warn you…I’m in a ‘stop the world I wanna get off’ kind of place too. You may find yourself with some company in that big tub. But I guess that would definitely make Joe question his stud muffin status.

Ann: It’s not his status that people would question! I’ll take the tub. You’ll just have to pull weeds!

Driving Everyone Mad

Pam: All of us at the office went out to lunch today. We took my boss, Archie’s car and I swear his driving sends me off the deep end!

Ann: Confucius say…man who drives like hell, bound to get there.

Pam: By the time we finally made it back to the office, that’s exactly where I wanted to tell him to go. He just won’t slow down no matter how anyone else in the car feels about it.

Ann: He knows he drives like a madman. I was talking to him about my low fat diet and he told me, “I drive way too fast to worry about my cholesterol killing me.”

Pam: He thinks everyone going slower than him is an idiot and the rare guy going faster than him is a maniac. He actually told us he never uses his turn signals because they only broadcast your next move in the road battle.


Ann: Maybe he figures the probability of being involved in a wreck is directly proportional to the time spent on the road. By driving really fast, he’s actually decreasing the chance of getting hurt.

Pam: Whose side are you on anyway? I should have known he was an aggressive driver when I first met him. I was updating the employee records and I asked him for his driver’s license to make a copy for his file. When I commented that he looked pretty angry in his license photo, he said that it was appropriate since that’s how he looks whenever he gets pulled over. In his picture he actually looked like he was cussing.

Ann: They say you never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.


Pam: He gets pretty mad. Once when we were on our way back from a meeting, he was driving his usual thirty miles an hour over the speed limit. Then he started complaining about the ‘woman driver’ in the next lane who was checking her makeup in the rearview mirror. But the whole time he went on and on about how she needs to pay attention to the road, he checked his phone for messages, poured coffee from cup to cup to cool it, and even moved a key from one key ring to another.

Ann: So just don’t ride with him anymore if he makes you that nervous.

Pam: Gas costs so much now I’m better off risking the medical bills. Besides, I got my revenge.

Ann: Oh no. What’d you do?

Pam: As I left the office I wrote a little warning to the other drivers in the dust on the back of his car. On one side I wrote “Caution: I drive like you do” and on the other I wrote, “Beware! I’m THAT guy”.

Ann: And you thought gas was expensive when you were employed!

Foundations By Home Depot

Pam: One of the women in my business meeting yesterday definitely had fallen victim to the ‘middle-aged make-up cumulative layering syndrome’.

Ann: Had it on a bit thick huh?

Pam: I think she used a trowel.

Ann: That happens…as women get older they seem to go one of two ways. They either accept that they have wrinkles and people will see them, or they try to spackle over them.

Pam: Well this lady definitely went the Home Depot route. But she should have consulted the paint department while she was there. Her face was at least five shades darker than her neck.

Ann: Ahhh….the dreaded line of demarcation. Women with a real sharp jaw line can sometimes get away with it. But have you ever seen it where a woman’s cheek fades right into her neck and then she tries to create a jaw line with make up?

Pam: Is that what they’re doing? I always assume they just don’t own a hand mirror and never see how they look from a side view.

Ann: Sometimes women just use the same foundation all year long and never switch colors to account for getting less sun in the winter months.

Pam: I don’t even wear foundation. When I put it on I look fine until I actually crack an expression of any kind. Then it shows every last crinkle and wrinkle to the max. I’m better off letting my blotchy skin, freckles, and age spots just shine on through.

Ann: Well no one’s going to make money convincing women as they age that they need less make up. That’s for sure.

Pam: When I was about fourteen, back when a fourteen-year-old was still a kid, I went on a weekend trip with my high school. It was Sister Robert Ann and about thirty of us from my Catholic girl’s school… or the home for wayward girls, as my dad used to call it.

Ann: Well it’s good to know you didn’t just suddenly become willful and disobedient as an adult.


Pam: Very funny! So anyway, I was assigned a hotel room with a girl named Kim who was always very popular with the boys. She was fifteen and always wore lavender eye shadow and heavy black mascara. We all thought she was so glamorous.

Well she stepped out of the bathroom after her shower and I was literally shocked. I hardly recognized her. She looked so different without her makeup on!

Ann: Hey, give her a break. She didn’t have her face on.

Pam: She didn’t have one of her faces on anyway. Throughout the trip I told her how great my boyfriend was and when we got back home she promptly stole him.

Ann: Wow. I bet that hurt.

Pam: I just knew if my ex-boyfriend could somehow see what she looked like without all that makeup that he’d dump her in a second and return to somewhat-plain-but-at-least-all-natural me.

Ann: Since when did men care about natural?

Pam: Yeah, I figured that out the hard way. I invited everyone to a pool party where I knew he’d see her without all the goop on her face. I wasn’t sure if she’d accept, but she was pretty enthusiastic.

Ann: What’d she do? Wear water-proof makeup?


Pam: Let me put it this way…make up wasn’t her only enhancement. The guys never even glanced at her face!

Ann: She had quite a body huh?

Pam: She confessed to the other girls that she was wearing silicone inserts in her bikini top to create her cleavage.

Ann: Well I can see why the guys never noticed her lack of makeup.

Pam: What can I say? I was playing way out of my league.

Ann: The kiddie pool’s over there.

Thanks For Noticing Me

Pam: I had lunch with our friend Robby today. It was good to catch up with him.

Ann: You mean Eeyore? When you asked him how he was doing, did he say very slowly and sadly, “I’m surviving...”?

Pam: Pretty much. He is a “thanks for noticing me” kind of guy, isn’t he?

Ann: He’s a real sweetie. But for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, he’s one of the most forgettable people I’ve ever met.

Pam: I know what you mean! I invited him to the Christmas party at my house. You remember…there were only about thirty people there. Well later that week I ran into him and told him how much I missed him at the party. I was mortified when he said, “I was there.”

Ann: You’re kidding! He was there? I don’t remember seeing him!

Pam: Well at least I know it’s not just me. I’m telling you, he’s Mr. Cellophane.


Ann: I think he’s what my mother’s generation called a ‘wallflower’. He just sort of blends in. The funny thing is that I really like him. He’s a great guy.

Pam: I know! I really enjoyed lunch with him today. We had a great conversation and he was really very interesting. But when he dropped me back by my office we ran into a group of mutual friends and, I swear, it was like he has a cloaking devise. He didn’t leave but he wasn’t there anymore either. It’s just weird.

Ann: I guess some people are just better in one-on-one situations. Actually, I prefer someone like Robby to the kind of person who sweeps into a room and just sucks all the air out of it. I feel a bit guilty when I realize I’ve overlooked him, but at least I don’t feel accosted by him.

Pam: Absolutely. My neighborhood ladies’ card group has one of those domineering people. She dresses loud, speaks loud, and takes over every conversation.

Ann: I know the type. You’d never overlook her at a party, huh?

Pam: I actually wait to see where she’s going to sit so that I can put as much distance between us as possible. I know I’m going to have to listen to her all night. But I’d prefer to do it without the blood dripping out of my ears.

Ann: Does she even know she’s like that?

Pam: She must. If there’s a conversation going on and she thinks she’s got something to add, and she always has something to add, she’ll actually not only interrupt, she’ll literally shout over the others to be heard.

Ann: Do you ever worry that you might be a wallflower or a dominator?

Pam: Is that a hint? You trying to tell me something?

Ann: I’m serious. Would you tell me if I was like that?

Pam: I promise….you’re neither. You speak at the appropriate times, in appropriate amounts, in appropriate volumes, and on appropriate subjects.

Ann: Oh great…I’m not a wallflower or a dominator…I’m worse…I’m boring!

Pam: I give up.

Beelieve It Or Not

Ann: You’ll never believe what happened to me today.

Pam: Now what?

Ann: I guess I should stop opening a conversation that way. Nothing I say shocks you any more.

Pam: It doesn’t seem to stop you from trying.

Ann: Hey, these things aren’t my idea. You know that saying? Something about having greatness thrust upon you?

Pam: Yeah.

Ann: Well, I have freakishness thrust upon me. It’s not like I seek out these crazy things.

Pam: Oh, I don’t know. I thought only opposites attract. So what was it this time?

Ann: I was out running some errands when Hannah called to tell me there was a bee in the house. You know she’s not one to overreact but I could tell she wasn’t likin’ the idea of sharing the house with a flying, stinging insect.

Pam: Who could blame her? So wha’d ya do?

Ann: I told her to go to her room and close the door and I would take care of it as soon as I got home. I cut my errands short and went home. Luckily, I keep wasp and hornet spray in the garage so I armed myself and walked in the house.

Pam: How brave of you. Did you find the bee?

Ann: Yeah, I did. But it was already dead, lying in the middle of the floor so I grabbed the vacuum and sucked it up. I called to Hannah that all was safe when all of a sudden, I heard a buzzing sound. I looked up in the skylight and there was the bee.

Pam: The one you sucked into the vacuum? How’d that happen?

Ann: A couple of years ago, Troy vacuumed a screw and put a big hole in the hose. Ever since then, half of what I vacuum shoots out the back.

Pam: The bee was playing opossum? He shot out the back of the vacuum? How creative.

Ann: That’s not the word that came to mind at the time. It was so weird. So I yelled to Hannah not to come out yet, I got the spray and killed the bee. This time I made certain he was meeting his maker before I sucked him up.

Pam: So all’s well that ends well.

Ann: Not so fast, Shakespeare. I had just given Hannah the all-clear when, are you ready for this, I heard buzzing! AGAIN!

Pam: You’re kidding. The bee still wasn’t dead? First a opossum and then a cat with nine lives? That’s one crafty bee.

Ann: I was baffled. I looked up in the skylight and there was that darn bee. And then I saw his twin… and his triplet… and his... Well, you get the idea. There were at least five bees buzzing around the skylight.

Pam: Oh my gosh! Where did they come from?

Ann: I have no idea. But even worse, I have no idea how to get rid of them. Any suggestions?

Pam: Have you considered training them? You’ve heard of a flea circus. You could have the world’s first BEE circus.

Ann: Ah, a bizzzzzness opportunity. I like it.