Surprise From Above

One of the more interesting things about living in the house in which you grew to adulthood is that when you find something unusual about the house, you have a pretty good idea how it came to be that way/who was responsible for it being that way. For example, when we moved all the furniture out of the master bedroom and prepared to paint it, Oscar and I noticed that on one of the walls, there was a large section of flat paint around which a semi-gloss had been painted, creating a very striking line of demarkation. In discussing it, I was able to tell Oscar exactly why that section of flat paint was still there. My parents had a huge, HUGE king-sized waterbed with a massive headboard. To move it would have taken hours, as they would have had to drain the bed in order to even pull it back a few inches. With two small kids, and considering that my mom was generally left to do any kind of home improvements herself, it was easier to leave the bed where it was and paint around it. Oh well....we were going to use primer when we painted, anyway.

Well, with Oscar and I having lived in the house as a couple for five or so years, now, and having completed a number of home improvement projects in that time, I was pretty sure we had encountered pretty much everything there was to encounter, by this point. Going forward, I had expected that if we had to deal with any more surprises, they would have been a result of things we had done. Oh, how very VERY wrong I was.

Oscar started ripping apart the closet in the front bedroom the other night. We have alread painted the main portions of the room and laid down new baseboards (with only a minimum of cursing) and Oscar has moved in his desk and computer equipment, creating a lovely office for himself. But to complete the look and give the office some added functionality, Oscar wanted to change the layout of the closet. He was hoping to build some additional desk space into that area. He sketched out his design for the finished product, took measurements, and finally brought out the saw and the hammer, to take out some of the existing shelving. Most of it came out pretty easily, but the highest shelf, when it came down, brought a whole host of items onto his head.

One of those items? An old pair of men's underwear, with a very unpleasant surprise in the crotch. Oscar and I knew immediately who was responsible. I called up my brother. "Dude, we just found the underwear you sharted in and hid in the closet. When did you DO that?" My brother, after yelling out the obligatory "GROSS!", wondered how on earth he was supposed to remember something that happened so long ago. Oh, I don't know...I think I'd remember something like sharting in my underwear and hiding the evidence away so my mom didn't force me to start doing my own laundry. (Oh, who am I kidding? If it was me, I'd probably do something like write the date in the waistband, just so when they were finally found, you wouldn't have to carbon date them to figure out how old they were. Consider it a new twist on the time capsule concept.)

Tonight, we joined my brother and his family over at my parents' house for an impromptu birthday party for my nephew. I somehow managed to work the Infamous Underwear into conversation again, which prompted a whole host of questions from my sister-in-law, who had not yet heard about our discovery, among them, "Why did you hide them?" My brother fixed me with an unyielding stare. "I don't know. Maybe because I didn't want the fact that I SHARTED to become a topic for PUBLIC DISCUSSION." Heh....I guess maybe I shouldn't tell him about my blog.