Flower Vases, Fishing Line and Shotgun Shells

I’ve made some pretty goofy mistakes in my life. Two of them were centered around doing the laundry, and both of them were the result of having a cluttered shelf, attached to the wall above the washing machine.

In the first case, I had just started a load of laundry, out in the garage, where our washer and dryer were. Everything seemed just fine until the spin cycle, when I heard a terrible ruckus coming from the garage. I dashed out there, opened the washer, and discovered 3-inch long shards of clear glass mixed in with the boys’ blue jeans and T-shirts. Using my best Miss Marple sleuthing skills, I deduced that the flower vase, which had been sitting on the shelf above the washer, had at some point in time "fallen" from the shelf and into the washer (I’ve always wondered what prompted the vase to fall – any idea, boys?). I had not noticed it when I loaded the clothes into the washer. The vase went through the wash cycles, but when it got to the spin cycle, it crashed and clattered against the sides of the washer, breaking into a dozen or more pieces. I gingerly pulled the clothes out of the washer, and found that the glass has stabbed holes and shredded most of the clothes, beyond redemption.

The second incident was similar, except that this time just the end of some fishing line, which was, apparently, dangling down from the shelf above, got into the washer. In this case there was no noisy warning, but when I went to retrieve the clothes from the washer, I found an AMAZING mess. The end of the line had gotten caught up in the clothes and the spool had been pulled off, onto the floor. During the spin cycle, the line continued to be jerked from the spool (by now nearly empty) and was tangled, twisted and twirled around every piece of clothing, and the agitator, in such a way that everything inside had become one solid, conglomerate of clothes and machine. I would have tossed it all out, had it been up to me. But Dan, bless his heart, offered to spend his afternoon patiently cutting line and untangling clothes.

Which brings me to this news item I heard about today. Call it an effort to make myself look better, by comparison, but I just have to tell you about this lady from Washington state who was actually shot by her cast-iron wood stove this past weekend! She remembers spilling a case of shotgun shells a few weeks ago, and she supposes that one of the shells fell, unnoticed, into the pile of newspapers she keeps for lighting her stove. Just after stoking her stove, on Sunday, she heard a loud bang immediately before being shot, in her left calf, by a shower of shotgun pellets!

Source:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/08/ap/strange/main4510023.shtml]