Humor lost and found

Let’s face it, sometimes life likes to lob grenades at you. You’re standing there minding your own business, trying to decide whether you would prefer tuna or egg salad for lunch, when, WHAM, INCOMING!

Having thrown yourself into the relative shelter of the basement, while you’re cowering among the moldy blankets, dirty unused pots, and old broken door bits, you wonder, did I do something so terrible that started an entire war?

All goes quiet. You wonder if it the worst has passed, and whether or not it is safe to come out. Maybe it would be better to simply shelter here for all eternity. Nice little spot, when not raining, which creates a little lake that covers the entire floor. After all, the sump pump usually drains the water eventually. Yes, maybe this is the best thing, to sit here forever, rather than exposing yourself to those bombs again.
But what the heck, it’s human nature to challenge the enemy and to dodge the bullets. When you finally dare to poke your head up, the air appears clear, although the basement steps have been blown to smithereens. Out you crawl, clawing your way back up, dirty, battered, but still alive. A good hot shower would make it all so much better.

In the shower, you realize that you have been hit, and that your sense of humor has been knocked off. You’ll look for that later, after a nice long nap.

Waking up, it’s time to go hunting that missing sense of humor. While you were still hiding in that hole long after the all clear sounded, leaving your sense of humor exposed on the floor, the four cats in the house came along and thought it was a new cat toy placed there for their entertainment. They batted it around for a while, chewed on it, argued over who got to whack it next, and then rolled it somewhere under a piece of furniture. If you’re going to be rearranging the living room to find it, may as well get the vacuum cleaner. You know there will be a lot of other crud to clean up as you search. Starting under the couch, where dust bunnies look like buffalos, you find forty two bottle caps, a human tooth, several pennies, hey, cool, a dollar bill, an entire walnut still in the shell, and holy crap is that a complete bat skeleton? But no humor.

Moving on to the coffee table, under which there are more bottle caps, what may have been a tomato in a previous existence, and a few moldy, well maybe it’s better not to know what those used to be.
Yes, there it is, under the chair by the TV, right between the hairball and the dead mouse. Excellent. Needs a good cleaning, so into the washer it goes. These things can’t be tumbled dry; they shrink. Hanging it outside to dry is a bit risky; the cat out there has recently been mutilating birds left and right. You don’t want him getting his claws in your newly refreshed sense of humor, so it’s now hanging safely on a hanger in the shower in the downstairs bathroom, drying out of reach of all creatures, except for maybe a passing spider. And there simply can’t be any harm in a little old spider, can there?