The Modernish Father

Men of the world, rest easy. Even if you’ve spent all day working on the car, in the yard or even at a slaughterhouse, you’re not the most disgusting person in your house.

At our house, we have two semi-slovenly males and a sixty-pound dog. But it’s The Wife and The Cat who take the cake as the grossest mammals under the roof.

Hair plugged

The Wife has been complaining that her sink in the bathroom has been draining slowly for the past month or so. I bought one of those compressed air drain blaster-things, but The Wife wasted it while I was taking The Dog for a walk. (“It would have worked if I had held it firmly on the drain…”)

All of that plus some mild boredom adds up to a fascinating Monday night of me cleaning out drains around the house. I thought about just pouring the foaming pipe cleaner into The Wife’s sink drain without bothering to clean it out by hand first. Thank God I didn’t.

In a little over a year, The Wife and The Cat (who drinks out of the sink even though she’s not supposed to) had managed to completely clog the drain with their collective hair. I don’t just mean that there was a bunch of hair twisted around the drainstop. THE ENTIRE PIPE WAS PACKED FULL OF HAIR. I don’t understand how any water was draining out of that sink.

It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing I have seen in nearly three decades of existence. That picture on the right and this picture of some more of the hair/sludge/fungus that I extracted were just the tip of the hairy iceberg. Unfortunately the batteries in the camera died before I could get most of the hair out and I didn’t really just want to leave it sitting there while I waited for the batteries to charge. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t get a final picture.

From now on, all of the bathroom drains are getting a preventative dose of drain cleaner each month. Or we’ll just have to get a new house.

Further news from the Old People State

The Boy had his ‘character breakfast’ this morning – a breakfast at Animal Kingdom with a number of Disney characters in attendance. He told me about getting to see Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Donald and Daisy before he started getting unintelligible from giddiness. I’m surmising it was a good day.

I wonder if Winnie the Pooh (owned by Big Brother Disney since 1996) was in attendance. If so, was bacon and/or breakfast sausage served?

This is why I’m not allowed to go places.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• I attended the Jeff Bagwell uniform retirement number ceremony about two weeks ago and had been saving it to write about on a slow day. Since it’s been so long, I guess I should just go ahead and post the link to all the photos before Bagwell dies of old age.
• The title of the new Indiana Jones movie has been “leaked” (blabbing it on MTV doesn’t exactly qualify as a leak in my book) and I’m… not really caring either way. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m getting older or that we already know every thing about every movie months in advance thanks to the interweb, but I just can’t bring myself to get excited about this. Sigh.
• I’m not shocked about the whole High School Musical nudie photos flap. That poor girl got a much later start than Lindsay Lohan, so she’s gonna have to hustle to make up ground.
• I generally find VH1′s Best Week Ever to be a very, very lame version of the far-superior The Soup, but this post on their site made me laugh. Because I’m a dork.
• People who can’t understand that the best thing for them right now would be to disappear completely: Larry Craig and Britney Spears.
• Surprise, surprise… Bush’s cronies at the Justice Dept. have sided with ISPs on the issue of net neutrality. Someone stop them before my monthly $45 cable internet bill balloons into $450.