How NOT to end up in a horror flick

Ah, October. Usually, I blog about my scary movie pics for the month. This is when my husband and I usually pick four horror movies and watch one each Friday night during the month. We are a little late picking our films this year although Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a gimme, and The Corpse Bride is already under our belts.

However, all this got me to thinking about how I can make sure that I never end up in a horror flick. I've come up with a list guidelines to follow to that end.

1 - No scary basements - Basements can be frightening, even without the threat of underground monsters and corpses. This is where normal household disasters such as floods can occur, and the ever present fear of finding some hitherto unknown giant insect only adds to their creepiness. I do confess that my own basement can be frightening. Those dark corners where you store things you never use (and let's face it that should mean you don't need to keep them) are unexplored territory. Who knows what doom awaits you when you do finally pull them out - for whatever reason.

At any rate, given their inherently spooky nature, it's best to minimize the risk by avoiding completely scary basements. It's much better to go for a finished basement, preferably one without those root cellar-style doors because those always seem to lead to an appearance in a slasher film complete with an eerie soundtrack and a masked villain who was abused at a summer camp.

2 - No scary attic This is only slightly less important than the basement issue. Attics are also breeding grounds for usually unseen insects, not to mention families of squirrels, raccoons and other interlopers. They are also classic places to find haunted items. They tend to have boxes that contain creepy old clothing, photos, books, and other mysterious items that might further the plot of a horror movie. It's harder to finish most attics, due to the necessity of town permits and expensive construction, so think carefully before purchasing a home with a creepy attic. For the record, crawlspaces are not much better.

3 - No weird street names Listen, when you're out shopping for a home, street names matter. Be straightforward with your realtor. Tell him or her that you do not wish to live on any streets containing the words Death, Kill, Blood, Bloody, Grave ... I could go on, but you get the picture. It's just better not to give any supernatural entities out there that might be looking for a new roosting spot any reason to think that your place should be their place.

Oh, and thanks to the Nightmare franchise, Elm Street is no longer an acceptable name. For that matter, since some otherworldly creatures like to behave in a manner contrary to our expectations, streets like Happy Place, Smile Path, and Wonderful Way should probably make it to the no-go list, as well.

4 - No town named Sanctuary Do I really need to explain this one? If there is one thing that generations of horror flicks should have taught us it is that a town named Sanctuary offers anything but. Ditto for places like Point Pleasant, Sunshine City, Happy Town, etc. As with street names, the reverse also holds true for town names. Avoid any townships that thought including words such as Devil, Slaughter, Kill, Blood, Grave, Skull or Witch in their name was a good idea. Oh, and any combination with the word 'Haven' is right out.

5 - No creepy collections (dolls, clowns/ventriloquist dummies/etc.) Even if I were a ventriloquist, I would have to find some spot outside of my home where I could leave the dummy.Everybody knows that someday, that doll will get up on its own and walk around stabbing people with a sharp blade (although for some reason, most of its murders will occur in silhouette). The same goes for antique dolls and clowns, which seem to be especially dangerous.

6 - No garbage disposal many a bright, cheerful, sunny day has been ruined by the impending doom of a clogged garbage disposal. If Hollywood is to be believed, it is impossible to clear one without some hapless plumber or well-meaning do-it-your-selfer losing a hand or at least a few fingers. Nope - it's far better to stick with the much safer sink strainer to dispose of food waste.

7 - Avoid Cemetery Proximity Never ... ever move or live near a cemetery. Now, in practice, I love cemeteries. I find them peaceful. I love to wander through the headstones and reflect on the lives lived by those memorialized on tombstones. However, let's face it, if Hollywood has taught us anything, it's to never live near one. First, there's a rainstorm, then some lines go down, and the next thing you know, dead people are calling you up and freaking you out. Interesting that though some of the occupants of older, historical graveyards probably never even knew what a phone was, they seem more than able to communicate via these phone lines. Death must endow our spirits with an innate supernatural knowledge of technology.

Several years ago, my husband and I drove by this cemetery sign. I was horrified. Perhaps the name is meant to express the hope that those interred there are enjoying an afterlife with the hosts of heaven, but I immediately thought, "My God! This will be Ground Zero for the Zombie Apocalypse!"

5 Kitchen Principles My Husband Doesn't Think We Need (but we do)

I used to think the success of a marriage depended heavily on how well you and your partner slept together. I don't mean sex, I mean sleep. Issues such as who snores, who steals the blanket, who bends their leg up in the middle of the night resulting in their partner being kneed in the kidney (sadly in our case, it's both of us) ... you know - that kind of stuff. However, I now think kitchen etiquette may be equally or more important. We rarely fight over sleep issues, but discord in the kitchen can start a war. I confess that I have a lot of rules - ahem I mean suggestions - that facilitate cleanliness, orderliness and happiness, although my husband seems to be under the impression that these are things I brought with me when I beamed down from the mother ship.

1 - Balanced Eggs - Does anyone remember being taught in Driver's Ed to remove and tighten lug nuts opposite each other when changing a tire? I do. And for some reason, that logic and the notion of balance led to my Egg Removal System. I start by taking one of the outer eggs out. The second egg to be removed is the one opposite the now empty spot at the other end of the container. This results in a nicely balanced egg carton.

Beautifully Balanced

My husband on the other hand, seems to thrive on the precariousness of chaos. He takes eggs haphazardly from random locations in the carton. Sometimes, he removes all of the center eggs. This isn't too bad because at least the container remains balanced. However, other times, I have picked up the carton only to have it tilt dangerously under the weight of the remaining eggs all being on one side. If I were a more suspicious person, I might even think his pattern wasn't random at all, but part of some master plan designed to make me crazy, even though he insists that 'this is the way we do it on Earth'.

This is madness!

2 - FIFO vs LIFO - The most important principle in my kitchen. When I first began shouting FIFO at my husband, he accused me of speaking in my alien tongue, and it took me some time to realize that I must have learned the principles of FIFO and LIFO in economics courses I took in college. Apparently, they don't teach that in standard high school educations (a glaring oversight in my humble obsessive compulsive opinion).

FIFO (First in first out) ensures that I will not have to engage in one of those horrid sessions where I end up discarding food items that somehow expired before we even bought our current home. My husband's LIFO (last in first out) system means that he will always be using our freshest ingredients, which might sound like a good thing but actually brings wastefulness to new heights. My obsessive compulsive stocking up plan directly clashes with his LIFO plan. More battles have been fought over FIFO/LIFO than I care to recount.

3 - Manual pre-wash - This brings us to Antoine. Who is Antoine, you ask? He is my dishwasher. No, I don't have a servant, it's the name I gave to the automatic dishwasher (because the perfect man would do dishes, right?) Anyway, Antoine was only named after the TV incident. Let me explain.

A few years ago, we decided it was time to join the 21st Century and buy a digital television. We lugged the old heavy clunker off the TV stand and went to the store. Hubby's eyes glazed over in euphoria as he envisioned himself sitting on the couch watching the latest action flick that starred a marine, a firefighter, and a cop chasing an alien monster through a city in hovercrafts on a screen three times the size of our old clunker. I snapped my fingers to regain his attention and we set about selecting a big screen television. He hugged the box the whole way as we wheeled the big cart through the parking lot to the car, where we realized that the box was too big and clunky to fit in my little Saturn. So we removed the large packaging right there in the parking lot and with a lot of grunting, cursing and 'be carefuls' barely managed to fit the television in the back seat. I drove home while hubby knelt on the floor holding the TV to prevent it from falling into the seats or windows. As I struggled to navigate the mean streets without the benefit of being able to actually see anything in my rearview mirror, I heard him murmuring to the newest member of our household. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm telling Gladys that everything will be okay," he replied. (And he thinks I'm the one who's crazy?)

At any rate, since he had Gladys, I named the new dishwasher Antoine. However, though Antoine does dishes, he is not a superhero. He cannot remove stuck on food, and if no pre-wash is performed, he spits plates and utensils back out still carrying remnants of the prior evening's meal. Just last week, my husband asked if I had unloaded and rinsed off the dirty dishes in Antoine because he recalled them having a lot more residue on them. "Aha!" I attempted to use this as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of dish-scraping, but I think the message was lost in his insistence that I am insane for sneaking around behind his back to rinse and reorder the dishwasher.

Because of course there is a set pattern for loading Antoine in the most efficient manner possible. Unfortunately, I have been unable to properly convey these rules to my husband. For the most part, I simply wait for him to leave the room to reconfigure the load pattern. Never, ever disrupt a man when he is loading the dishwasher. This might discourage him and result in an even worse condition ... dishes left in the sink.


4 - Recycling On a serious note, recycling is very important to me. I am afraid that our abuse of the environment is stealing the future from the next generation.

As such, I have tried various techniques to enforce recycling in my home. I set up a composter, which I really liked until I realized that my dogs would always know that the composted material was originally food as evidenced by their tendency to eat the dirt.

I try to limit the number of paper products we use, however convincing my husband that it shouldn't take 15 paper towels to drain the grease and oil from chicken cutlets has proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Our town collects a lot of material in its recycling efforts, and I've tried to keep my husband updated on the latest changes, but his memory program must need updating because he keeps reverting back to Recycling version 1.0 in which only minimal amounts of material are collected. This means I actually have to REMOVE items from the garbage in order to redistribute them to the appropriate recycling container. This is not - I repeat NOT - a task that I am fond of.

5 - An Easy Retrievable Inventory Plan  I have OCD. I admit it. I'm not ashamed (most of the time), but that's only because few people actually see the extent of my madness, which only becomes visible when one opens a cabinet and sees 20 plus cans of tuna. This would be less problematic if I were a Doomsday Prepper, but I'm not.

My madness revealed

Now, in keeping with my FIFO standard, the cans are stacked in order of best by date, but that's still a whole lot of tuna. (On a side note, I have resisted the temptation to further organize them by brand name, unlike my aging CD collection, which is still stored in Genre/Artist/Date of release order.)

And that's just one example. I currently have 31 rolls of paper towels and 42 rolls of toilet paper, yet somehow I managed to run out of tissues at the height of allergy season. And that's because of improper Inventory Storage. My husband believes that if you're able to close the freezer/cabinet door or the shelf doesn't collapse under the weight of its massive supplies then all is well. However, as you can see, not only does this violate my FIFO principle, but it makes it very difficult to tell when you are running low on something. Now, my husband believes this wasn't a problem because we have enough toilet paper to see us through the decade and that can be used in a pinch as a substitute, but TP is a poor substitute for tissues, especially when your trees are dropping enough pollen to make your car seem as though it is glowing with nuclear waste.

The quest for an easy inventory management system continues.

I suppose some people will read this and conclude that I am either insane or an alien as my husband insists, but I believe order in the kitchen to be one of the keys to personal happiness and marital bliss.