It Was the Dog. . . in the Laundry Room. . . with the Underwear. . .and the longest run-on sentence you've ever seen in your life . . .

So you must know by now that whenever I return to the house after I've been away I immediately look for the tell-tale signs of miscreant teenage behavior which has taken place in my absence.

It's not that I don't trust my children, really.   It's just that I can't shake the old Reagan philosophy of Trust, but Verify.

Plus, when I think of all of the miscreant behavior that has taken place right under my nose, one cannot help but wonder what sort of trouble these girls could get themselves into while I was slumbering peacefully 150 miles down the Garden State Parkway.   And even though the only female offspring who remains a  teenager in the chronological sense of the word was safely ensconced in Italy under the watchful eye of another lucky parent,  I was all-too-aware of the fact that Veggie and Trigger were still at home - working by day, but still quite capable of wreaking havoc by night.

And so it was that I re-entered my house after my week-long vacation with Drip Dry looking for signs of a wild party or illicit co-habitation.  And even though I had been deprived of the full complement of C.S.I. techniques which I usually employ (for both the cleaning lady and the recycling truck had visited whilst I was away) there were still some discernible changes in the Spin household when I returned:

1. The kitchen microwave had a distinctive dent on its door.
2. A plunger sat next to the laundry room toilet.
3. Drip Dry's one bottle of Old Spice hair and body wash had been replaced by fifty-some bottles of girlie scrubs, rubs, and dubs which now adorned the shower floor.
4. My laundry hamper was empty for the first time since circa 1983.
5. The dog had developed a pathetic whimper.
6. The bathroom scale was clearly broken - weighing everything a full five pounds heavier than before I had left for vacation.
7. Discharge instructions from the local emergency room lay on the dining room table.
8. A strange odor of cat pee now lurked on the bathroom rug.
9. An empty bottle of Captain Jack was found hidden under Ponzi's bed.
10. The magnetic word-art on the refrigerator read "my big gross, stinky, underwear tastes delicious!"

And so it became painfully clear that the following had happened in my absence:

After consuming an entire bottle of rum in a fit of utter loneliness, the despondent dog, pining away for just a sniff of her master, decided to stick her snout in my laundry hamper, and in-so-doing, pulled out a pair of my big, gross, stinky underwear which she immediately deemed delicious! after which - as dogs are wont to do - she mistakenly showed the booty to Trigger who rightfully felt the need to take back the offending item from her - but the dog, my friends, has not been dubbed a retriever for nothing, for once she has decided that something tastes delicious! the skills of a sumo wrestler are required to wrangle said delicacy away; and so, in the inevitable tug-of-war which ensued, Trigger undoubtedly found herself airborne, crashing with a loud Thud! into the microwave oven before landing in a crumpled ball on the kitchen floor - at which point Veggie arrived on the scene in time to spy the dog rushing into the laundry room with the coveted panties while attempting to bury them in the toilet bowl - and,Veggie, being of the mind that she would never touch her mother's unmentionables when they were in a state of total dryness, much less once they had been immersed in stinking toilet water, decided to flush them down the toilet, thinking that the same bowl had on more-than-one-occasion been the ultimate repository for an errant thong or two of her own in the past - but while septic systems, my friends, may think that a teenager's thong is, indeed, a delicacy, they seem to have no love for old lady granny panties (delicious or not) and so the mouth of the toilet started to belch and spew at an alarming rate, which drove Veggie to very quickly learn the fine art of toilet plunging - after which she felt so personally violated that she ran into her parents' shower to wash off the offending smell - replacing her father's Old Spice with every essence of femininity she could find; and it was only upon re-entering the kitchen that she discovered Trigger still unconscious on the floor in front of the now-irreparably-dented microwave - at which point she whisked her off to the emergency room with all haste; and once the last human had left the building the still-intoxicated dog now looked at the tea-totaling cat with a look which said, I think your butt might just smell delicious too! at which point the cat ran like a bat-out-of-hell to her owners' bathroom - jumping in fear onto the bathroom scale, forevermore adding five pounds onto anything ever placed upon it, and accounting for the overwhelming aroma of cat urine upon the bathroom rug.

The end. 

The only thing I can't figure out is how the dog, in all her drunkenness, was able to open the laundry hamper. . .


So what do you think happened????

I'll leave the comment section open this time to see if you have another idea . . .