Laugh or cry?  You be the judge.

Tom decided this morning that the kitchen sink was dirty.  Me, when I make that judgment, I just get out the cleanser, you know, and do a bit of scrubbing.  Not Tom.  He plugged up both sides of the sink, got out the Clorox, poured a good quart of it into each side, and turned on the hot water.  While the first side was filling, we had a little debate about the benefits of cleanser, and then he switched the faucet to the other side, and I shrugged (what woman complains when her husband wants to clean something?), went upstairs to escape the bleach smell, and forgot about it.

Ahh . . anyone who knows Tom is well-acquainted with his colorful vocabulary.  Twenty minutes later a stream of invective you can only begin to imagine invaded my peace.

“What?”  I yelled downstairs.

“Um, a little help here?” he hollered.

I went downstairs.  The smell of bleach was overpowering.  That might be because it was in the dining room.  And the living room.  And everywhere in between.  Yep–the bleach-infused water had made its way across the hardwood and out both kitchen doors in its quest for freedom.

The knife drawer was full of water.  The cabinet under the sink, ditto.  The recycling bin, ditto.

I quickly assessed the situation.  “Did you forget to turn off the water?”

I confess, it was hard not to laugh–but I knew he’d have trouble finding any humor in the situation.

Tom predictably responded with several words containing the letter F.

Wait.  It gets better.

Tom is usually a great one for solving problems, but in the same way that his solution to the dirty sink problem differed from mine, his solution to the flooded-house problem was not to get the mop (oh no, not the mop, which is what I would have done) but to take every single towel from both main-floor bathroom cabinets and fling them, many not even unfolded, onto the floor to soak it all up. By the time I got downstairs, he had already achieved a colorful patchwork of towels from the dining room through the kitchen and into the living room.

One rule every housewife knows, a rule that Tom had chosen to ignore, is that one never, ever uses bleach when washing towels.  You wind up with varying degrees of fade and tie-dye.  All of our towels have now suffered this fate.  He swears they’re fine.  As I’m the one who put them in the washer, I know they’re not.

On the good side, you could do surgery on our floors if you wanted to.  Not a germ in sight.  But my eyes are still watering.  Whether it’s from laughing, crying, or bleach, I’m not sure.

Fun times in Hagenson Land today!