recipe for disaster...

We've been whipping up some pretty great little dishes around our house lately. Descrupalicious if I do say so myself!

Our meal on Monday night was not one of them. It barely made the work of lifting a fork to your face worthwhile. So, before we were done with our bowl of pasta, spinach, mushrooms, pine nuts and other things that did not contribute to anything flavorful...we gave up.

There were lots of leftovers we had no interest in either. So, without thinking...I promptly and rather ceremoniously dumped it down the drain. And so began one of life's little (big) interruptions.

For four solid hours, I worked on unplugging the clog. I tore the sink apart, plunged things that weren't meant to be seen again and got myself and the rest of the kitchen covered in what can only be described as Blech! I went to bed a failure.

The next morning, I tried to make a shortcut of things by picking up a snake auger (how's that for fancy plumber-terms?) at the local grocer whilst grabbing some produce (thank you Meijer for allowing me to multi task). All they carried was some manual thing that you hand-crank into the drain with the idea of freeing the clog. Well, all that did was have me nearly hanging myself and muttering several unrepeatable phrases, while my hands turned into rawhide. This all took another three hours.

When Lauren got home, I presented her with the good news that we'd be going to Lowes. At which point she would have declared any one of the above-mentioned phrases if she knew any of them. After calmly explaining to her that mommy was done with both herself and the kitchen smelling like the bottom of the sea, we departed.

I perused the other-better augers in the plumbing aisle with the help of a man in a red apron. He stopped his tearful and patronizing pity on me when he realized I was not there on a mission from the hubby and actually knew what a P-trap was and that I was in the market for my second auger of the day.

After making my selection, we checked out some lamps and ended up on a 30-minute hunt for a shoe that Sarah had flipped off her foot and, thanks to 5 Lowes employees and two sympathetic customers, was found three shelves up next to a lamp we did not buy (this was the highlight of the kids' day and is an entirely different blog entry itself).
I got right back to the sink when we got home, while the older girls chose to play outside...which was best because within the hour, I finally released the curse word of curse words in a rapid machine-gun like fashion. The new auger was failing me as well.

Just as the punctuation point hit the last word, the phone rang. It was my brother, the miracle worker. I managed to say "hello", which was not the word still stuck in my head. I then explained the situation and he promptly replied he'd be right over. I thought it was hopeless. I thought we were doomed to call for emergency clog removal services. I should know better by now.

After trying out a few things, he scratched his head in a small state of perplexed he only spent a brief time in. He then had a "Aha!" moment having to do with the piping layout of the house and the shape of the auger-end...and in true MacGuyver fashion, freed the remains of the meal for which I have already destroyed the recipe.