No I DON'T have a certificate for this...

Is it just me or has the blogosphere been kinda dead the past couple of days? Fewer or shorter posts from almost everyone I read, major slowdown in the commentatiousness and even I'm making up posts out of whole cloth just to be doing it.

It's just as well I guess - I have other things to do today.

Thing one is - get some sleep! Really, I've been running on fumes for a couple of days now...

Thing two is - (when I wake up later today) do some plumbing. Exciting, I know. But we have a toilet that is flushing very slowly. We had two slowsies - the one I pulled up a couple of weeks ago had a toy car and a plastic hairbrush stuck down near the seal area. I wonder who flushed those? Lord knows what I'll find in this one. The other toilet also has a bad valve so I'll be fixing that as well. And to make things even peachier, the dishwasher just sprang a leak. Yeah, I know, I could just call a plumber but I'm trying to save some money for that Mazda RX-8 down payment my upcoming tuition.

So while I'm wrestling with toilets and dishwashers, I'll leave you a little something from my as yet un-re-published blogspot archives. This is a story on a similar theme that I wrote only a few days after I started blogging (almost a year ago).

Enjoy:

What my life is like... a true story: A few months ago, I was performing one of my regular household duties. I was in an old pair of shorts and a t-shirt, standing barefoot in about six inches of dirty bathwater in the main bathroom of our home. With an oversized screwdriver and an extra-long pair of needle nosed pliers, I was attempting to remove a giant soap-congealed mass of long red hair from the now non-functioning bathtub drain.

Stacie can't understand why this keeps happening: "Not aga-in!"

Gee, I dunno. It's not like it's MY hair. Most of mine went down the drain years ago.

Besides, mine's neither red nor long.

So there I was in my sweaty-brow Herculean late-night struggle to extricate the wayward LONG RED hair from the former drain.

The male-child, Tad, who was probably six at the time, stumbles into the bathroom.

"AW, man," he says, grabbing his butt, "I gotta go, bad."

Go ahead, I won't look.

So he drops 'em and hops up onto the toilet.

As I struggle, he struggles.

He looks over at me and says "Dad, do you have certification for that?"

Excuse me?

"You know, a certificate to do that? "

(glaring) No, but I know what I'm doing.

"I think you have to be properly trained."

Finish your business and go back to bed.

"You might hurt yourself."

Keep it up, I might hurt YOU!

(giggles)

I'm not kiddin'

(laughs)

SERIOUSLY!

(guffaws)

Remember, he was only six.

This is the kind of thing I deal with EVERY DAY.

P.S. and I still do!

Have a great weekend!