HOPELESS CASE

An article in this morning's newspaper shouted out at me. "Put your house on a diet," the headline read. Clutter. Get rid of it!

It may sound like an oxymoron, but I consider Big Bore and myself to be organized clutter-ers. We have a lot of "stuff" that is grouped together and consumes practically every empty space in the house. Start with the living room walls---filled with 69 paintings and photographs and even a seascape puzzle glued together and framed. Six trips to Colorado and Arkansas are documented with collages of eight pictures each. Treasures. Can't live without them.

Then there's the cat "stuff" inside the entertainment unit. Book shelves and cabinets filled to the max. Photo albums, at least 40 of them. And plants. Once it turns cold outside, many of them come inside--22 of them at the latest count. There is no room for a dining table in this house because the plants take up all that space.

Big Bore is responsible for cluttering up the kitchen, basement, and garage. Again, it's all organized. Right now he's in the process of building more shelves in the basement. He's pretty much maxed out the shelving in the garage. I know where absolutely nothing is in these three clutter havens, but ask him and he'll go straight to it.

So, after reading this news article I decided to put Casa de la Flaming Bore on the Clutter Diet for today. I went over to the candle area in the living room and immediately tossed out two glass lids that go to candles that are almost used up. Don't need 'em. And guess what? Later in the morning Big Bore confronted me, the two glass lids in his hands.

"Why are you throwing these away?" he asked. I guess he'd been rummaging through the trash.

"The house is on a diet," I said. "We don't have any use for them."

"I do," he protested. Apparently once the candles are used up, he can melt away any leftover wax in the glass container, clean it up, and use it to "store things," like nails. Well, excuse me!!!

Later, he came back into the living room with a plastic plate/bowl I'd removed from an end table and had taken to the kitchen sink to be washed and put away.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"It was on the end table not being used. It's part of the fat I'm cutting out with the Clutter Diet."

"Well, I want to put it under this fern," he said. Go for it. Never mind that the fern already had a perfectly fine plate underneath it.

Maybe I'd better sign up the house with Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. I can already tell that the Clutter Diet isn't going to work around here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELVIS

Music news bureaus have reminded us today that had the King of Rock 'n Roll not abused his body into an early death when he was just 42, he'd now be 77 years young.

My own history with Elvis dates way back to my grade school years when I watched him on black and white television swiveling his sexy hips on the "Ed Sullivan Show." I was too young to go goofy over him---those days would be reserved for The Beatles in the early 1960s--but my older sibs were fans and had some of his 45s, like "Teddy Bear" and "Blue Suede Shoes."

The first Elvis tune I remember really "digging" was "Can't Help Falling In Love." I was an 8th grader at Teentown dancing cheek-to-cheek with the boyfriend of the week, thinking that swaying together back and forth to this song surely meant that, at age 13, I'd found my one true love for all time. --But in later years I always thought the words "Because I'm So Stupid" should have been added to the end of the song title.

I actually made the crusade to the Presley mansion in Tennessee many years ago. What's it called? Graceland. I had my 13-year-old nephew Brandon with me and we were visiting my old college pal Walter who lived in Memphis at the time. The two guys absolutely refused to pay hard-earned money to hop on a tour bus--maybe $10.00 or so at the time-- and walk through the joint, so I had to settle for peeping through the wrought iron gate. We also perused the Elvis souvenir crap shop across the street from Graceland.

This place had EVERYTHING you can imagine with Elvis's image, in either the skinny blue jeans version or the chunky white, jeweled jumpsuit variety, take your pick. At one point I began laughing at all the crass commercialism, and Walter advised me to put a lid on it since I was at risk of offending the crowds of Elvis-philes. "This is like a religion to some of them," he warned. So, I shut my mouth, opened my billfold, bought a cheap ballpoint pen that contained an Elvis image (jumpsuit) that floated around in some liquid, and left the building.

But--I am sorry that Elvis Presley is not around to celebrate his 77th birthday today and shake along with the rest of us. He would probably be amazed that so many fans, after so many years, still "can't help falling in love" with his music.

A FAT GIFT

Some ditzy Barbie mom in England gave her 7-year-old daughter a Christmas gift that I'm positive none of her classmates received--an $11,000.00 gift certificate for liposuction once she's 18! Yes, just one more sign that the world has gone mad! Whatever happened to little kids getting a bicycle for Christmas?

Lipo Mom would be better off using all the bucks in her bloated wallet to give herself a make-up makeover. Someone needs to tell her that her thick, pink lipstick is totally scary. Of course, maybe the expression on her daughter's face is just a reaction to Mom's appearance. "I can't believe my mother looks like a tramp and is making me wear false eyelashes!" Having Lipo Mom for your mother must really suck.

BANKING ON THE JAYHAWKS

Once again I'm participating in the Coaches for Cancer 3-point fund-raiser. For every 3-point swisher made by a KU basketball player, I'm pledging 25-cents. Hopefully, by the end of the season, I'll have close to a $100.00 donation. And this year, thanks to Big Sis, I have an official Jayhawk piggy bank in which to deposit my pledge money! So far, I have $20.50 stashed away.

The 'Hawks open conference play tonight against K-State. Here's hoping for a victory and a pig-full of 3-pointers to come.

QUEEN OF THE COCKROACHES

(WARNING: Do not read the following blog if your stomach is weak.)

I had planned to make a New Year's Resolution about keeping my house cleaner until I watched "Hoarders: Buried Alive" the other night on television. This was absolutely, hands down, the worst mess I've ever seen on this show--and there have been some doozies.

Living in the squalor was Sherry and her two teenaged children. Dad had gotten fed up and moved out. Sherry's excuse for never throwing away a single piece of trash in probably 10 years or more and just hanging out in an easy chair on the patio all day was that she's diabetic. Therefore, she left all her used insulin needles, hundreds of them, on the floor with the rest of the crap. In the master suite bathroom, she had a three-foot stack of used sanitary napkins, toilet paper, etc. piled in one corner. Lovely. I cannot even begin to describe the toilet stool or the inside of the refrigerator. There are no printable words.

But the worst thing about this house was the uber-infestation of German cockroaches. They were EVERYWHERE!!! A population explosion of magnanimous proportions. Remember the Alfred Hitchcock horror flick THE BIRDS? Well, replace the birds with German cockroaches, and you pretty much have Sherry's house.

When two insect exterminators bravely entered the home to inspect "the problem," which included nests of black widow spiders, they were so freaked out that they called in a Hazardous Materials team for clean-up. Then Sherry became so pissed off when a professional organizer told her the place was a danger to her and her children that she refused to help out ...and lay on her bed pouting while the Haz-Mat'ers worked around her.

Now, I, The Flaming Bore, would have just taken a torch to the place and watched the cockroaches and Sherry go up in flames, but the dear folks trying to come to her rescue worked for six weeks and finally declared it fit for human occupancy.

Aftering uttering, "Oh, my god!" in disbelief over and over again during this program, I've decided to drop the housecleaning resolution. I can live with a little bit of cat fuzz and dust and newspapers spread out on the coffee table. Compared to Sherry, I'm a neat freak! I want to thank The Learning Channel for teaching me that I don't have to waste any extra time trying to keep my house clean. It looks just fine. But if a single German cockroach ever decides to take up residency at Casa de la Flaming Bore, I'm declaring war!

GONE SOUTH RE-VISITED

Here's the South Park version of The Flaming Bore back in college. Funny, but Big Bore says this picture looks pretty much like him at the same age. Critter says: "Long live flower power...and tabby cats!"

SOCK IT TO ME

Resolution #1 for 2012: organize my socks drawer!!!! It is a total wreck..single socks just thrown in haphazardly, nothing paired. And what gets me is that when I remove them from the clothes dryer, I actually DO partner them together. I think some evil sock attacker enters the drawer at night to separate them. I waste more time trying to find a match-up every morning. So today, right now, I will venture into the bedroom and get those socks in order. AND I resolve to keep them that way the ENTIRE year!(Geesh, I hope I haven't pushed myself too much to aim for the impossible.)