Instead of offering hints about your household, which you already know more about than I do, I thought I'd give you a few hints about my household instead, in case you wanted to drop by and bring me baked goods:

* My front doors average out to two reasonable doors. The doorknob on the front outer door may come off in your hand because it is attached with duct tape. This is made up for by the front inner door, which is so secure that it cannot be unlocked from the outside.

* Just inside the front door is a mat for boots. Half of this mat is not very useful because it is taken up by a coat rack. This coat rack is also not very useful since I always enter through the back door, due to the previous point.

* No two clocks in my house show the same time. Many of them are randomly set some number of minutes fast, in an attempt to prevent me from being late to things. The result is, when I am cooking dinner, I cannot just remember that I put the chicken in at 7:45; I must also remember it was 7:45 on the microwave clock.

* Rather than resetting my clocks for Daylight Savings Time, I keep half of them on standard time and half of them on savings time. This, in combination with the slight clock differences mentioned above, means that any clock may be an hour and 20 minutes fast, an hour slow or anywhere in


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between.

Most people who visit me like to wear a watch.

* The clock by my bed had to be unplugged because I couldn't stop looking at it.

* My kitchen is organized by placing things near what makes me think of them. The vegetable oil and olive oil are next to each other, the nuts and honey are next to each other, and the colander is hung on the same nail as the calendar. I briefly considered organizing my whole kitchen by phonetics, but my freezer has no room for rice on ice, so the plan was abandoned.

* Ever since the infamous Bull Liver Pate Incident [Tales from the Seth, Issue 172], I have organized my pantry by expiration date. Items that expire this year are at the very front. Items that don't expire yet are further back. Items that have already expired are ... I wish I could honestly say thrown out, but actually, they are in my fridge.

* There are very full bookshelves in four separate rooms. These are mostly full of books that I may never read again. There are also books that remain unread because I prefer to read books that I am borrowing. There is always, without fail, at least one book in the bathroom. Both of the books that I have had published professionally make excellent bathroom reading.

* My bedroom contains three very large wooden dressers that were passed down to me from my parents. I open them only a few times a year, and instead stack all of my folded clothes on top of them.

* Roughly half of my clothes piles are free T-shirts. I have purchased precisely one T-shirt in the past 10 years; the rest simply accumulate. I once wrote an entire column about this phenomenon, which inspired one of my friends to repeatedly give me more free T-shirts.

* Due to the sheer mass of T-shirts I possess, individual T-shirts last longer than one might expect. I have considered celebrating milestones with my T-shirts, but doubt that any rabbi would want to Bar mitzvah my 13-year-old shirt. I have one shirt that is old enough to vote and in two years will be old enough to drink.

* Another reason my shirts last longer than usual is that I have a strict policy against wearing new clothes. Whenever I acquire a new shirt, it immediately goes in the "new clothes" pile, and is not worn for a period of at least three months.

* The unfolded, unsorted mass of socks exists because I believe all socks are created equal. They are piled atop my unplugged clock.

Seth Brown is an award-winning humor writer, the creator of GodTo Verse.com, and couldn't make this up. His column appears weekly in the Transcript and weakly on his Web site, www.RisingPun.com.