Unclogging my Life…or at Least the Kitchen Sink

This morning, I woke up to a clogged kitchen sink.  I went to get my plunger, but it was nowhere to be found, and I mean nowhere. It’s not like I would have accidentally thrown it out or gave it away. It just up and disappeared.  Maybe it’s a paranormal thing, who knows?

Like everyone else in this world, I need my kitchen sink, so I took my super-duper chemical unclog-the-drain stuff and poured it in.  Before any “green” people start yelling at me, let me just say a few things in my defense: I know it’s not the best stuff for the environment, but give me a break. I recycle everything; I do not use any pesticides on my lawn or in my garden; I carry  the reusable grocery bags unless I need to get a few plastic ones for poop patrol; I have replaced all my “bad” light bulbs with “good” light bulbs; and  the electric company has some kind of gizmo on my air conditioning unit that allows them to shut off my air for 20 minutes at least once a day during heat waves to save on energy.  Get the picture?  I try, but I needed my kitchen drain cleared and this stuff is the best stuff I have ever used in my entire life and to be honest, it would take me about two hours of plunging to get the same result anyway.

Okay, I know I am ranting, but to be honest, this isn’t even my intended rant. I meant to go off on a totally different tangent, and this is the topic: Why could I not find my plunger?  I know why – because no one in my freaking house ever puts stuff away where they found it.  That’s why.  The plunger should have been in the laundry room. It has a designated spot there.  As I was running around the house at 5:30 AM trying to find the missing plunger (and keep in mind I am not a cheerful soul in the morning), I could  not but help notice how so much stuff was just lying around–out of place. So, of course, at that moment I had to start picking up the clutter and moving to its assigned location.

I was putting some papers away in a kitchen drawer when I noticed how messy that drawer was. Before I knew it, I had dumped out the contents and began to sift through the mounds of paper, throwing away old receipts, pictures and refrigerator magnets. Then, I moved on to the next drawer which holds the menus from various restaurants in the area. I started to throw them out as well.  I opened a third drawer and just to make my point that I was pissed off that I had to be cleaning at this early hour, I made sure to slam it shut  along with some other cabinets that were nothing more than innocent bystanders in this rage fest.  My goal was to wake up  everyone who was still sleeping and invite them into my hellish morning. If I was going to have a ranting moment, I didn’t want to waste it on just the dogs who were already retreating to undisclosed locations in the house.

Finally, my husband shuffled down the steps and into the kitchen. “What the hell is going on?  What’s all the banging?”

(Ah, a good lead in question.)

“What’s going on?  Look at the damn sink and where is the damn plunger? I looked in the damn laundry room and down in the damn shop and guess what? It’s not anywhere! Where did you put it?”

“I didn’t have it last. Well, can’t we be calm about this?”

Yeah, right. Calm.

“No, we can’t be calm because our house is overrun with junk.  This needs to be taken care of now! I am going to rent one of those dumpsters and everyone is going to throw out all their crap! That means the stuff in your shop has to go! Coleen’s been home for a year and we still have her college crap in boxes in Muffie’s room.”  (My departed German Shepherd had her own room. Now, it’s sort of just an extra room with junk because my other two dogs don’t seem to need their own space.)

“You are going to rent it today?  Can’t we throw out in stages?”

“It never gets done.”

“Don’t rent the dumpster. I promise we will get it done, but not this second. I have to go to work. Do we have pop tarts?”

The male mind never ceases to amaze me.  It works in three modes: food, sex and sleep and not always in that order.  I continued to throw out stuff while he toasted his cinnamon pop tart and after the third trash bag was filled, I decided that perhaps he was right and the junk chucking should be done when we were both calm and focused on the task.

I calmed down and poured myself a cup of coffee and went out to sit on my back porch.  And that is when I saw it: my plunger – yes, my plunger sitting so innocently in the corner, and then I remembered. My neighbor borrowed it and I wasn’t home when he returned it, so he put it on my back porch so I would find it.  I didn’t tell my husband of my discovery before he left for work. I am trying to figure out a way that this can still turn out to be his fault.  Any ideas?

photo by itschak