Paying attention

[pegkerr]

I was walking down one of the corridors at work, and a little rattling sound nudged me out of my preoccupied thoughts. I stopped. Silence. I started walking again and the rattle resumed.

I got to my desk, took off my shoes and turned them over. The rubber had worn away a bit on the sole of each, leaving a little flap over the heel's hollow core. I stuck a finger under the flaps and, no lie, extracted about eight pieces of gravel that had managed to jam themselves up into the heels. I put the shoes back on and the rattle was gone.

Tell me about some minor irritant that you suddenly noticed, and when you took care of it you wondered, "How come I never noticed it before now?"

Comments

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

There was a chair in my living room that had been broken by the sudden application of a very large rump about .... oh, long enough ago that it happened in our last house. As a result, the support for the seat was gone on one side, so that you would sit down and list dramatically to one side. Instead of fixing it, I pulled up the cushion and stacked a big pile of magazines there to support the cushion, and went on sitting on it for, oh, years. Still listed but not so much. Last month my mother was visiting and decided to fix the chair. Amazing!

Damn those dim lights!!

[ceelee.livejournal.com]

All the insects in the midwest find themselves in the ceiling light fixtures and slowly, but surely we are working,cooking and computing in gloom. Then my 6'2" son comes to visit and takes down the lights and cleans them of the little dried bodies.
Gross and cool at the same time!!

Hi Peg, Claudia here, I discovered you as a friend of Scott L's. I enjoy your writing so much, esp. about your daugters. I have 4 kids.. well, young adults: 21, 24, 27 and 28 and work in a school so I can relate!
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

[aome.livejournal.com]

Mine usually has something to do with something that needs cleaning, like the kitchen cabinet faces, or the fridge, or something. You just stop seeing it after awhile, until suddenly it's "Ack - I've had people in this house and it looked like THAT?" Last week I noticed that a downstairs wall had been spattered with something, possibly coffee (ie, Will stumbled while holding a mug), and how long had it been like that before I noticed?

[liadan-m.livejournal.com]

Actually, those little pieces of gravel are manufactured inside your shoe. They give the heel weight or something...I just know that when I wear mine down to where the rubber over the cells is thin but not yet broken, I can hear them rattling inside, and when they finally get through, I can pull out the rocks.

Shoes and such

[nwl.livejournal.com]

I'd had that happen, nagging little stones in the hollow heel of my shoe. I pulled them out and, since I had pieces of left over batting, I stuffed the heels with the batting. No more rattling, ever.

But as to an annoyance. Well, it's really my hubby who had an annoyance. His new car had a rattle somewhere and he couldn't find where it was. If I was in the car he would insist it was on the passenger side and I heard it on the driver side, if I heard it at all. It only rattled on bumps.

He was talking about taking the car to the dealer one day when I reached up and popped the sun visor back into its holder (I had been moving it around with the sun). The rattling stopped! My husband unhooked his sun visor - the rattle was back. He hooked the sun visor back in - no rattle. We laughed about it, glad he hadn't brought it to the dealer.