We arrived home around 10 pm Sunday, after a weekend that saw us spend a night in Woodstock, a night in Moncton, and then a day of shooting all along the Fundy coast. Needless to say I was wiped out, so after a post-roadtrip beer I thought it would be nice to get into bed with my book. (I’m currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is amazing, but it’s taking awhile to get through.) As much as I love travelling, I find it always takes me at least a day to find my regular schedule again once I’m home. Going to bed early could only help.
In the bedroom I was greeted – nay, assaulted – by the most vile stench. It turned out that one of our cats, Ophélie, had expressed her displeasure at being left alone for the weekend artistically through organic mediums.
AG set to work cleaning up the mess, stopping at times to catch his breath because the smell was so bad. This is when things started to go really wrong.
The first mistake was not putting Ophélie’s canvas of choice, a small duffle bag, directly into the wash instead of trying to clean it by hand.
The second mistake was putting the tissues that had been used to clean the bag into the toilet rather than into the trash.
The third mistake was flushing.
You see where I’m going with this. At 3 am we found ourselves with a clogged toilet, and that’s about the time we realized our fourth mistake: we moved last year, and left the plunger in the old place. Somehow in the ensuing 15 months we’d never thought to pick one up.
Well, we were certainly thinking about it now.
This is about the time I started google searching for home plumbing remedies, and we tried them all. Hot water poured high. A wire hanger. Baking soda and vinegar. If we owned a Shop-Vac we would have tried that, too. At this point we were really respecting the superior technology that a plunger represents. AG even went out to the nearest 24 hour convenience store… no plunger. By 4 am we’d exhausted the options, and even managed to get the shower drain plugged. Finally we gave up, and fell into bed.
At 9 am the next day, AG went to Home Hardware, bought a plunger, and the whole problem was fixed in under 3 minutes. Needless to say, the rest of Monday was a total wash on the productivity front, so now I’m recalibrating. Getting back on track.
The moral of this story: if you don’t own a plunger, go buy one now.
As for Ophélie? She remains unimpressed.
