Small Wonders:

I have an index card box on my desk. I carry Post-It Notes and small notepads with me everywhere I go. When I see something that strikes me, or am spontaneously blessed with some great epiphany, I jot it down and throw it into the box. The girls call it my Idea Box. I like having the answers to all of life’s mysteries at my fingertips.

Here is but a brief sampling of my more brilliant, and not so brilliant, insights.

The person who first came up with the term “muffin tops” to describe my chubby waistline overhang is an observant genius and should be working with Ben & Jerry developing new flavors of ice cream.

When the sun sets on Glendale and orange light shrouds the skyline, the towering glass structures look like giant, peach Jell-O molds.

I have to threaten my 6-year-old with the stockades to get her to pick up a juice box straw wrapper off the living room floor, yet she’ll spontaneously mop the entire house, driveway and lawn of her own free will.

If I can’t park my average-sized truck in a compact car parking space at the Americana on Brand, you shouldn’t be allowed to park your Prius in the regular size parking spaces.

If I had a superhero power, it would be the ability to tune out everything around me — screaming kids, Perez Hilton, Ann Coulter, Keith Olbermann and the helicopters flying over my house whenever I sit down to watch a Discovery Channel program on mackerel migrations.

Greater minds than mine should spend less time colliding atoms, pondering String Theory and analyzing global macroeconomics, and more time trying to figure out why children have the ability to open doors and drawers, yet lack the reverse ability to close them.

My dreams have come true. I saw Sean Connery in a print ad sitting seductively on a dock at some exotic foreign beach. Next to him was a Louis Vuitton handbag. Finally. Louis Vuitton is now manly.

Huell Howser is the Gomer Pyle of TV show hosts.

I finally stopped receiving calls and postcards telling me the factory warranty on my car was about to expire — though it expired five years ago. I collected about 163 postcards, each letting me know this was the “final notice” that I was eligible to receive an amazing extended warranty. Thankfully the folks at the warranty agency have all gotten jobs at a carpet cleaner and a back pain specialist’s and are now calling me again. Every day.

Forget South Central. The Costco parking lot is the next great urban war zone.