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Providing entertainment through tragedy

It started with a box of drowned Q-tips.

Actually, it started long before that, but it wasn’t until I saw the cotton swabs that it all came together into one horrible, I-must-scrub-the-walls picture.

Why is this my life? It would be awesome if we could get through maybe an entire month without my feeling that my life could be a family sitcom with a few tweaks. Sometimes, I feel like I could round the corner and run into the “Modern Family” cast.

Someone recently asked me if these columns are true.

My answer was, “unfortunately, yes.” But maybe fortunate for readers — if you’re amused. I hope you’re amused at least some of the time, or I’m missing the point and this is just space filler.

Anyway, after that little detour, we’re back to the drowned Q-tips.

It wasn’t my fault this time. Well, maybe. I did leave the kids at home alone for an afternoon, but Sass is very nearly a legal adult — let us all pause to take a whiff of smelling salts — and I thought they were responsible. I was wrong. Someday I will learn assumptions are terrible things, but this was not that day.

I got home and Sass was already in damage-control mode.

“The upstairs toilet flooded, but we already mopped it up and cleaned the bathroom,” she said.

This was bad news, but mitigated by the fact they actually knew what to do and implemented it instead of waiting for me to come home from work. If I’d come home from a long day of work to a dirty bathroom, that would have been exhausting.

You will remember that, last fall, Sass swamped our entire kitchen by leaving in the middle of filling the sink to wash dishes and not coming back for an hour or so. I’m not sure if submerging different rooms is her subtle hint that we should remodel, but I wish she would just come out and say it, if so.

“How long was it running?” I asked.

They had a terrible answer. “We don’t know.”

I thought that was bad, but the universe wasn’t done with me yet. I walked into the downstairs bathroom, and there was a puddle of water on the floor.

What?

“Did you flood the downstairs bathroom as well?” I asked the children.

They were baffled by this and assured me that they had only wrecked havoc upstairs, not down.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I won’t be mad if you did” — I would try my best, anyway — “but I need to know where this water came from.” Water does not, ordinarily, just randomly appear in the average household. At least, this is the way it has always worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

No certain answers were forthcoming, so I started mopping up the water. Then I looked at the shelves along the back wall.

And there were the Q-tips. Drowned.

I realized the water must have been running for a very, very long time. Long enough to run under the floorboards, down the wall and across the downstairs floor.

If my life is a sitcom, I can’t wait for the commercial break.

(Wallace-Minger, The Weirton Daily Times community editor, is a Weirton resident and can be contacted at swallace@pafocus.com)

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