Author Archives: tarvasalutes

Frying Donuts in the Wee Small Hours

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I saw this Help Wanted flyer in my local grocery store the other day and it made me smile.

A Help Wanted sign seeking a donut fryer to work from 2am to 8am.

The most unusual hours I ever worked were on a swing shift from 4pm to midnight as a copyeditor and proofreader for yellow-page phone directory ads.

There was a day shift too (I shared a desk and a computer with the day shift employee), but as one could earn a few cents more per hour, I decided to work the swing shift.

On my shift, the company building was always dark, empty, quiet, and calm—the only occupants were two small teams of graphic designers and copyeditors. The idea was efficiency—the swing shift copyeditors worked on the ads that had just been produced by the day shift graphic designers and vise versa.

What other jobs out there have unexpectedly unusual working hours?

Earring Organization with Buttons!

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I store pairs of stud earrings by inserting them into a button

A great way to store stud earrings and keep them together so that you don’t have to spend time hunting for the other half of a pair in your jewelry box trays is to put each pair into a button.

These particular buttons are 7/8″ in diameter and the distance between the two holes is 5/16″, which makes them big enough to accommodate all my stud earrings.

A package of about 20 basic plastic 7/8″ two-hole buttons cost me around $2 at my local JoAnn store. The fact that they were purple was just a bonus!

Nostalgia! A Working Walkman

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A Walkman portable radio/cassette tape playerApparently—and amazingly—I own a working Walkman portable radio/cassette tape player.

I came across this Walkman this afternoon while I was sorting USB and charger cables. I popped in some batteries, popped in Golden Greats by The Ventures—a tape which I just happen to have, along with a couple of Johnny Horton tapes, because I’m slow to let go of old technology—connected it to some speakers (also old), and presto—it worked!

A working Walkman portable radio/cassette tape player

Right now, I’m listening to “Wipe-Out.” It’s the last song on Side 1, so pretty soon I’ll get to flip the tape to Side 2. How fun!

This Walkman, and a couple of others like it, were used by me and my siblings on many a family road trip during the early 1990s when I was young.

If You Met My Family, You Would Understand

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Decorative sign stating, "If you met my family, you would understand"

Here are some fun sayings and quotations about family:

Some family trees have beautiful leaves, and some just have a bunch of nuts.
It is the nuts that make the tree worth shaking.

Friends come and go, but relatives tend to accumulate.

He who has no fools, knaves, or beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.
—Old English proverb

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
—George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright

I don’t have to look up my family tree because I know that I’m the sap.
—Fred Allen, American comedian

Can a first cousin once removed be returned?