It All Started with a Clogged Drain

This afternoon when I was cleaning the upstairs bathroom, the sink stopped draining.  I asked A. to go to the hardware store in the village and get some drain unclogging stuff.  He did.  Then he poured it down the wrong sink upstairs.

Super.

I told him we needed more because the sink in our bathroom was totally unusable.  He didn't really want to go back to the village to get it, but when I suggested perhaps we could make it a family outing, he was all for it.

So we went fishing.  There's a dock at the village park where A. and Cubby go to catch pan fish.  I didn't really want to go, but since Cubby has a cold and has been a little, ahem, delicate of temper, I thought it would be prudent to tag along and forestall the whining for Mommy that would be certain to occur if I wasn't present.

When we got to the village, I remarked to A. that before we left I wanted to go the wine store to get a bottle of my favorite wine (a Vidal Blanc made by a local winery).  Then he decided that since it was 4 p.m., he would get a can of beer.  And he got me my wine. I wasn't actually planning on drinking any of it right then, but, well, he got the chilled bottle. And I was sitting in the sun on a blanket in the grass.  Of course I had to have some.  We didn't have a corkscrew, but it didn't matter, for we are woodchucks and ingenuity is ever our watchword.

Woodchuck instructions for wine opening: Push the cork right into the bottle with a pair of rusty pliers.  Then, to get the cork out of the way so it doesn't keep floating at the top and getting lodged in the neck of the bottle, thereby preventing the wine from coming out, find a long stick and push the cork down far enough so it's in the wider part, where it will flip sideways and stay that way.  Now you can drink straight from the bottle, because if you don't have a corkscrew, you probably don't have wine glasses.

This is how I found myself sitting on a blanket in the park with a baby this afternoon swigging wine straight from the bottle.  It was way classy.  And I bet it resulted in great clucking and head shaking among the two elderly couples walking their yippee little dog in the park.

It's pretty nice, though.  Just remember that if you're drinking straight from the bottle, you have to be very careful to watch your intake.  Especially if your current job duties include producing milk for a small person.

Incidentally, it turned out that on A.'s first trip to the hardware store, he bought the only bottle of drain unclogger they had (it's a really, really small hardware store), rendering the trip for a second bottle useless.  So it's a good thing we had another reason for going to the village.