Whatever Works

One thing that you are told when you move: your catalogs are not coming with you. (So long, Crate and Barrel, Gump's and Victoria's Secret!) What you don't realize is that that means you inherit all the catalogs that the previous owners of your house had forfeited upon vacating (Hellooooo, Lillian Vernon!).

And apparently, the people who lived here before us accumulated quite a few mail-order friends during their 30+ years of living here-- about seventy percent of the mail we've received thus far has included glossy pages picturing birdbath cleansers, pet stairs and sassy fashions for voluptuous ladies. But my new favorite catalog of all time is one that arrived yesterday, called "Whatever Works: Garden - Home - Pest Control."

While it, too, included pet stairs (because you never want your pets feeling excluded from the events in your house that take place at a height of about two feet), it also featured a variety of items that I had no idea existed, and now cannot live without, including:

1. Onion Goggles-- safety eyewear for those who fall victim to the evil stink rays of the nefarious onion. For contact lens wearers only, apparently.

2. The Super Kegel (tm) Exerciser-- which is sort of gross? Because I thought this was a sex exercise? And I'm really disturbed, because I can't tell if we're looking at this lady's butt, or her front. But apparently, aside from giving you awesome sex skills, it also has the added benefit of improving your bladder control!

3. The Escape Hammer-- which I can't believe my dad doesn't know about, because as Safety Man, it makes no sense that he would have allowed me to go all these years without a method of breaking my car window from the inside should I be caught in quicksand or trapped with a really aggressive bee. I'm particularly enamored of the man in the illustration, who so calmly wields the hammer and uses its sharpened indentation to cut his seat belt, all while thrusting his cheekbones out.

I think my favorite thing in the world would be to encounter a situation in which all three of these implements was necessary at once-- your bladder's about to fail while trapped in a car full of half-cut onions.