Mr. X, With the Paper Towels, In the Bathroom

There's a little mystery going on at Adam's shop this week. I'm not sure I really want to solve it.

We have our annual mid-year meeting w/ the tax man coming up soon, so Bella and I headed over to the shop/office to do some accounting. Apparently Bella got bored while I was working, and headed into the shop bathroom for some fun.

I happened to walk past the bathroom later and saw that her "fun" included attacking the contents of the bathroom trash can. Which, of course, means extra work for me, because you know Adam's not gonna be on his hands and knees cleaning anything!

As I stoop down to pick up the pieces of shredded paper towels, I start to notice that some of the shreds have a strange, brown, kinda gritty smear on them. With the amount of dirt, oil and machine grease coming through that shop, I didn't think much of it at first. But the more prevalent the strangely colored shreds became, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe it wasn't something a little worse than dirt, oil or grease.

To steal from the always-quotable Billy Madison: "It's poop again!"

This realization leaves me with several questions:
1. Who wipes with a paper towel?
2. Who wipes and throws it in the trash can?
3. Who wipes and throws it in the trash can and then doesn't get rid of the trash? I can promise you I have never thrown used toilet paper in a trash can, especially not at someone's home or place of business, but if I did, AND it was an open trash can, you'd better believe I'd be takin out the trash. Gross.

So now that I've cleaned this damn mess up, all I can think about is whodunit.
As far as I can tell there are only 2 suspects (since I know it wasn't me!): Adam and our farm hand. Most likely Adam, because he'd do it and think it was funny, plus our farm hand is a really clean guy. So I straight up asked Adam about it. He had no idea.

The plot thickens.

I still cannot bring myself to suspect our farm hand, it's just not his way, so now I'm stumped. I thought and thought about who else had even been in the office lately.

Then it hit me.

Adam and I have been tearing up the old house's bathroom to prepare for new renters. Since we had to rip EVERYTHING out (save for one cabinet), we had to shut off the water. No water, no toilet. Adam and I haven't done all of this work ourselves, however; we've had help from several people.

Here's what we think happened. Person X was helping out w/ the renovations and needed a bathroom break. Since there was no working toilet at the old house, Adam went to our house and Person X went to the shop. Person X realized, probably a little too late (mid-dump?), that there was a TP shortage, and used the next best thing available: paper towels. (A little PT for some TP, if you will.) Post-wipe, they were probably concerned that the PT would not flush, so they threw it in the trash can. (I'm still trying to imagine that scene. Standing there with a shitty paper towel (SPT) in your hand, contemplating what to do. Talk about a bad day.) Days later, Bella comes in and shreds it up (talk about covering your tracks--or skid marks) and I find the crime scene.

I am NOT down with the S.P.T.
Yeah you know me.

Moral of the story: TP needs to remain the catcher. PT should stay where it belongs: the DL.

Mickey the fake?

The Mouse family (Mouse IS Mickey's last name right?) apparently spans many generations.

I thought between the traps, the dog and blocking off their red carpet access to the basement, that we'd finally rid ourselves of Mickey and the Gang.

Wrong.

Yesterday, I used the guest bathroom and not only were there the usual turds all over the floor mat but, there were some new, highly scattered turds next to the toilet. These bastards bypassed the glue trap (after somehow taking a huge mouse dump on it and not getting stuck) on the OTHER side of the toilet and went around to crap behind the trash can. I could not believe it. (Perhaps this is my payback for the incident at Casey's last summer...that story is for another day.)

You'd think after this long dealing with these little assholes, I'd be used to it.

Wrong.

Today, I mentioned to Adam that perhaps a new trap is necessary, given the situation. He got a funny look and asked me to describe in a little more detail, exactly what the problem was and where it was located. By the time I was done, he was laughing hysterically. Naturally, I'm getting more and more pissed by the second, and am totally in the dark as to where the humor in this situation lies.

The "mouse turds" are dark chocolate cookie crumbs.

He ate cookies while taking a shit, tried to throw the package away (because, apparently, if you're going to eat cookies while on the toilet, they have to be 100 calorie south beach snack packs) and missed, therefore dumping cookie crumbs all over the floor.

I started to laugh, feeling pretty embarrassed for thinking they were mouse turds. Then I got mad again. Why, exactly, if you know you dumped cookie crumbs all over the floor, wouldn't you clean them up? Ugh. Men.

We did actually see a live mouse last night. Bella chased it into the fireplace. And so it continues.

P.S. Adam asked what I was writing about tonight, and I read this blog to him before posting it. He is STILL laughing about those damn cookies. The crumbs are still on the floor. And that's exactly where they're going to stay until he cleans them up.

P.S.S. Can I just say how satisfying it is to hit spellcheck and have its response be "no misspellings found?" GREAT!