Quirks and Rituals plus a Bedroom Tour

I’m a person who does better with routines but we’ve had this conversation before so I’ll move on to the topic of the quirks and rituals that seem to define who I am. For example, when I get up in the morning the first thing I do is pee which probably doesn’t vary too much from what you do. But do you then check the color of your urine to judge whether or not you’re drinking enough water? You can’t go by smell alone because if you’re smelling your pee you’re way past the point where you’re not getting enough water. Run don't walk to the nearest water faucet and stick your mouth under the running water. (That ends the Public Service Announcement portion of this post.)

Then I shuffle out to the kitchen to put my coffee pot on before shuffling into the den to start my computer. After drinking my allotted two cups of Trader Joe's or Starbucks for the day---that coincides with my computer time---I’m back to the bedroom to 'half make' my bed. I call it a ‘half make’ because I don’t pull the quilted comforter all the way to the top in case I want to lay across the bed to watch something on Netflix before bedtime. I don’t want to lay across the comforter because I love it and don’t want to wear it out. Having only one smart TV in the apartment influences my quirks and rituals. At my old house I didn’t have Netflix's or a smart TV to watch them on and I rarely had anyone drop by unannounced so my bed often went unmade. Here, I’ve had a half dozen or so ladies who've wanted to see my blackout shade combined with a translucent shade so I’ve had impromptu bedroom showings on the way home from a class or dinner. There are other occasions where I've had maintenance calls so I like to keep my apartment looking presentable thus I make half make my bed every day but Sunday.

I've never given you a virtual tour of my bedroom so this seems like a good detour to take here. The first photo below shows my 'half made' bed. The second photo is of my window (with its two shades) and smart TV corner and moving around the room to my bookcases. The desk in the next photo is one I refinished back in the ‘60s when I was hot and heavy into Early American décor. I used it to do all my writing on in the days before I owned a computer and I couldn’t bare to part with it. Now I use it just to hold my day planner. I have to walk past it each time I go to the bathroom so I have no excuse for missing what needs doing on any given day.

The last photo on the tour is at the top of the page and it shows a close-up of what's inside the white antique dental cabinet seen in photo with the desk. It's what's left of the massive collection of old and sentimental stuff I had in my old life. Some things are valuable while most are only special because of the memories attached. The funny thing about that stuff is when we had it (and much more) in a huge glass showcase visitors were always curious and spent time in front of that showcase, taking it all end and asking questions. Here, not a single person has even noticed the dental cabinet much less what’s inside. Who would have ever thought I'd miss show-and-tell time but I do. The next time my niece visits I think I’ll make her humor me while I show her my collection of radio and cereal premiums. You never know when the Lone Rangers' silver bullet ring will come up in a conversation and if it does she can say she’s seen one.

Another quirk I have is I am not using the garbage disposal. I had the one in our last house removed because I hate it. My husband had one in the house he had before we got married and he was always getting silverware chewed up and it scared the crap out of me that one day one of us would lose a hand because of that disposal. Here, I have a wire mesh sink stopper over mine and I keep my garbage in a plastic bag in the refrigerator until the night before the trash gets picked up at the bottom of the building’s trash shoot. Don’t tell anyone I do that! I make sure that any raw garbage I have isn’t mixed in with anything with my name or apartment number on it. Not that I accumulate much in the way of raw garbage since I don't cook much and I eat my main meals elsewhere on campus, but still it’s a dirty little secret I don’t want spread around.

Actually, not using appliances here isn’t all that quirky. I know of 4-5 people who have never run their dish washers and wash what they have by hand. Some say it’s to save on their electric bills, others will admit that you need a degree in Modern Technology to run the damn thing. I have the manual bookmarked on my computer and have to refer to it from time to time because my hips reprogram that touchy key pad on a regular basis. Yes, yes, I know I can lock the program I prefer into the dish washer but I'm only willing to learn so much, not to mention I accidentally locked my oven door playing with its program and it took me a half hour to figure our how to deprogram that mistake. And have I mentioned that bringing up the washers and dryers around here is a sure way to liven up a conversation because they are not user friendly models and they take forever and a day to run cycles. Others here don’t run their stoves or microwaves because the planners with their charming excuse for wisdom didn’t have the foresight to get easy-to-use appliances with less bells and whistles for the demographic they were building for. 

I have more rituals and quirky things to write about but my bedroom tour ate up too much of my word count to share them now and it's just as well because as a post topic it turned out to be a rather dull topic to write about. Can't help it. As the ancient Scottish proverb so gleefully declares, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ©