Sweet Justice

11:30am Sunday Morning

HA! Justice is sweet, and she loves me! Not that I enjoy other people's misery as a general rule, but His Royal Majesty is down with the flu (or something else extremely virulent that makes all ingested food try to leave your body at the same time from any and all available orifices). Sometimes that "Do Unto Others" thingy really comes back to bite you in the butt, eh? While I sit drinking hot coffee, snacking on Rice Krispies Treats and watching football, he lays moaning and drooling in bed with a big bowl of "just-in-case-I-puke" next to him.

Really, I'm not that mean. I have brought him some nice cold 7up and turned up the heat for him. I'm just not feeling too sorry for him right now.

On the good news side, the Boy fixed the computer. I don't know how he did it, but the backspace button is working fine now. I have learned not to ask too many questions when he does such things (I can imaging my laptop in pieces while he fixes it) and so there it is.

Husbands are Overrated

11:35 pm Friday Night.

So I am here to tell you, husbands are truly overrated. Everything they can do we can do better, and the one thing they can do that we can't we can buy something that can do it for us with a lot less mess. I am writing to you from the front porch as the cow's ass I am married to locked me out of the house. I AM NOT KIDDING. He locked me out of the house. I had a feeling asshead was going to do it, too, but he got me to go outside by -- and this is truly henious -- THROWING MY LAPTOP OUT THE FRONT DOOR ONTO THE LAWN. OK. The fact that I am on the porch should tell you whom I value more right this second, the old man in the nice, warm house or MY STUBBORN ASS SELF with my now-broken $1,400 laptop. The backspace button isn't working right.

I am happy to say that HE DIDN'T WIN. Okay, I'm freezing cold and have to pee but I didn't cave in and that's what counts, right? Sooner or later he'll come out to have a smoke and I'll go in on my terms, not his. And at this point in life, isn't that what matters, winning? Small battles, small victories, these are put on a mental scorecard that is tallied at the end of the marriage. If the winner is the one who's died, the loser has to begrudgingly give him/her props during the memorial service. If the loser is the one who's died, the widow/er can start dating at the actual service. Not only that, but if the winner is the one left standing they get to have the yard sale and sell all of the precious objects collected over the years for 25 cents or less. The pair of dress shoes lovingly chosen and worn exactly twice because he never took you anywhere dressy? Put a buck on 'em and watch 'em walk off... His favorite CDs that were always in the car so you could never play music YOU actually liked? Put 'em in the "FREE" box and let the music play! And the list goes on. Seriously, if you think about it, the mental scorecard hardly matters if you're the one left standing. 6,000 points for living longer! Game Over!

Why Finding?

Finding hard to find items begins as a frustration. You’re unable to just pull something off of a shelf somewhere, or you call around a little to the most likely places and come up empty. Then it’s less an inconvenience and becomes a challenge. You’re not going to let a little something like that thwart your plans or put a project on hold, no way. So you begin to search in earnest. Yellow pages. Internet search engines. Old codgers. No information source is left unturned, no half-remembered conversation isn’t dredged to the surface or your brain until you find it. But then you hit the wall; you know it’s out there, but it’s hiding out. Then forget about challenge, the finding becomes an obsession. Whispering in your ear at the dinner table, tickling your brain-pan the virus of NOT FINDING wends into your nervous system. There comes a time when you go to the professional – you tell yourself it’s not giving up, hiring someone else to find and do for you what you must abandon yourself, but you know. You know it could have been, doggone it, it SHOULD have been! But you’ve admitted defeat, truly, as soon as the smirky voice of the guy you’ve hired says, “You shoulda called me first. It woulda saved youse a lotta time, lady.” Ugh. I hate to lose.

This is what I determinedly sign myself up for daily, and I must admit I love it. Every time I find an item for a client I feel like I’ve won a race. Maybe I have won the race against the “not knowing.” It’s a game I play against the emptiness of ignorance, a battle between the lost and found. And then next time, I’ve got an edge on it.

Finding Weird Stuff

So, here's the thing; all day long, I find myself looking for weird stuff for my customers. I've gotten pretty good at being able to locate some pretty crazy stuff, not to mention that I end up finding it in more than one place! Between the 'net, the phonebook, and my bottomless brain I'll betcha I can find it for you, too.

The craziest thing this week was actually pretty tame; I had to find a toilet seat warmer. Now, funny as it sounds, there are a lot of folks who really dislike sitting on icy-cold commodes. Not to mention, some people have medical conditions that make a cold toilet seat painful and uncomfortable. I mean, who'd have thought they made such things? This one was remarkably easy, seeing as there are several companies who make them. But which one to pick? What about features and benefits? Price? Can a large person use it regularly without breaking it? These are the big questions that The Stuff Finder gets to look into. Turns out to answer most of these questions you either have to speak Mandarin Chinese, be familiar with icy butts or be a toilet guru. Hmm. I'm not claiming expertise in any of these areas, so I set out to learn... it's all about the can, man.

Faster than calling my friend Andy Wang, real estate agent extraordinaire, and asking him to call Yung Tien Industrial Co., Ltd. in "TA TU HSIANG, TAICHUNG HSIEN, TAIWAN, R. O. C." and asking these pertinent questions about their "Healthy Toilet Seat Warmer" (No More Icy-Touch!), I turned to THE WEB. An American company, Hogue Consumer Products in Paso Robles, California. Turns out there are quite a few different models of toilet seat warmers available to the savvy online consumer. Hogue has a heated model for only $80! A bit distasteful, however, is the "easy to clean" directions, which suggests that the consumer may "quickly release and put it in the dishwasher!" Uh, I have one thing to say about that... WHAT THE HECK???!!! EW, ICK, GACK. What the heck are they thinking?

Other choices ranged in price from a $217 model from Kohler, a well-respected manufacturer of all things bathroom-y to a Brondell heated bidet for a mere $459. My personal favorite was the CleanButt BidetSpa. Yup, you heard it right. Major props to this company for callin' it like it is! I love that you know exactly what these folks are selling; for $649 you can convert your existing toilet into a bidet (for the less cosmopolitan readers out there, that's a butt washer). It even comes with a wireless remote control (!) that, according to the website, adds "a sophisticated grandeur to any bathroom."

The ultimate in toileting luxury is the TOTO Neorest Elongated One-Piece Toilet. With features like an integrated front and rear washing system, heated seat with temperature control, warm-air dryer function, remote-control and integrated air deodorizer you might never want to "get off the pot." Of course, you may not be able to afford to with the $4,125 price tag.

I sure did find out a lot more about heated toilet seats than I ever thought I would. It was enlightening and a whole lot of fun finding out that the potty could be so comfy!