Humor

Dumpster Diving for Something to Chew On

/ kensrobin / 9 Comments

Our dogs are chewers. When they were puppies, they ate shoes, pillows, and kitchen cabinets. Then in early 2008, we went on a trip to California, and left them with a housesitter who came home to this:   

 

 

 

 

 

They had not only torn off the ends of the love seat, they had ripped open the cushions and shredded the stuffing inside. They also ate each of the corners off of the throw pillows. They also tore into the matching couch as well. Did I mention that the couch and love seat set were only a few weeks old?

Apparently the dogs were a bit angry.

Ever since then, we have tried to head off the dogs’ inner chewing desires by providing them with a plentiful supply of dog toys to chew through. However, since they can tear apart a chew toy in less than a minute, it’s hard for the supply to keep up with the demand. I used to scour clearance racks in pet stores and websites for cheap toy deals, until I discovered the ultimate dog toy supply store:

Goodwill Outlet.

Goodwill has an outlet? Why yes. Yes it does.

Goodwill Outlet is the purgatory of donated goods. The merchandise has been featured in a regular Goodwill store, but hasn’t been purchased, so it is then taken to the Goodwill Outlet, where the wares are offered up by the pound, in hopes of selling to the best of the dumpster divers. In fact, the more you buy, the cheaper the price per pound.

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The merchandise is no longer presented in size and color-coordinated displays, but tossed into bins that are wheeled into lines, where hoarders and bargain hunters alike dig through the piles of random merchandise. Shopping at Goodwill Outlet is WORK.

At the same time, we have occasionally found some very good treasures. A nearly-new Kate Spade purse, a Lilly Pulitzer blouse, a lacrosse stick with the tags still on it. The thing that Goodwill Outlet is best for is selling lots of things that no one wants to buy at Goodwill, such as: crutches, shoes, golf clubs, exercise equipment, As-Seen-On-TV cast-offs,and stuffed animals.

Oh yes, they sell stuffed animals BY THE POUND.

Of course stuffed animals don’t weigh much, so we can get a shopping cart full of them for less than $30. That will last us 6 months, and is much cheaper than buying new furniture.

So, Saturday, Ken and I braved the land of the lost and the home of the hoarders as we loaded up on dog toys to last the next few months. Our stuffed animals have made their way home from the store, have been washed and dried, and have now arrived in the place of fulfilling their final stuffed animal destiny: keeping our furniture safe from the destructive jowls of our gruesome twosome.

Overachieverhoodness

/ kensrobin / 5 Comments

I have a confession. I’m a bit of an overachiever.

And maybe not just “a bit.”

But I’m not an overchiever about everything. In fact, I’m not an overachiever in most things. Housework. Exercise. Crafting. Flossing.

Rather, I choose my obsessions carefully. I set goals. I achieve them, most of the time. I’m just careful not to set goals for something I can’t or won’t achieve.

I’ve been at the top of the academic programs I’ve gone through, but not because I’m super smart. It’s that overachieving workaholic in me whose claws come out when I see a textbook, some notecards, and a lecture outline. Studying 100 hours for a single test was the norm for me. By the time I finished PA school in 2005, I had a stack of flashcards taller than me. That was only from 1/3 of my classes. And I knew them all. Back and front.

Of course, this tendency toward overachieverhoodness leads to a fair amount of ribbing. I still get teased on a regular basis for my perfectionistic tendencies, and my driven approach to my select goals. And that’s okay, because I know that deep down inside, people want their physician assistant and/or professor to be at least a bit of a perfectionist, especially if they enjoy the personal impact of a lower rate of medical errors that accompanies a hefty dose of overachieverhoodness.

My overachieving ways have landed me in an academic setting, which I love. Unfortunately, that same overachieving nature has led me to teaching Medical Physiology each summer, which covers 700 pages of physics as applied to the human body in 12 weeks. And every summer that I have taught this class, I have ended up nearly blind by the end of the summer. The first summer, I thought my prescription had just changed. My second summer, I thought it was eye strain. This is my third summer, and sure enough, by the first few weeks of class, I was struggling to see.

My vision always gradually returns to normal in the fall, but during those summer times in which I have to cover 80 pages of text in a week, having a visual problem is very disturbing.

So when I scheduled my annual appointment with my optometrist this year, I told him about what was going on. We talked about typical eye strain issues — proper lighting, computer positioning, reference material placement, but I had tried all these and they hadn’t helped. (After all, as an overachiever I had figured those things out myself!)

Then he got a quizzical look on his face, and stated that he had an idea. He examined my eyes, and sure enough, he was right.

When my eyes are tested in a clinical setting, they like increasing amounts of correction, even beyond what I need. So I end up with a prescription that is much stronger than needed, and my eyes have trouble accommodating for the extra strength. If we backed off on my prescription, rather than increasing its strength, we might be able to break the cycle of the syndrome.

“Really? That is very interesting. Does the syndrome have a name?” I asked, knowing that I would go home and at least Google it.

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s called Overachiever Syndrome.”

 

Silence.

 

“Is there another name for it?”