Hello America, and welcome to the favorite game show of four-year-old boys everywhere:  WILL IT FLUSH?  The show where a certain young boy tests common household items to see if they will make their way down a standard 1940’s vintage toilet.

Today’s contestant:  A rubber ball with a plastic covering that has the earth printed on it.  She is a beautiful blue and green hue, compresses when gripped in a hand, and is approximately five centimeters in diameter.

OK, let’s join the action already in progress.  Boo has placed the ball in the commode and is pulling down on the handle now.  The tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife.  I haven’t been this excited about anything like this since he attempted to flush a 6 inch articulated toy soldier.  We all remember that incident, don’t we folks? The toy made it almost all the way down the pipe before its hand got caught on the bottom of the bowl, causing a rather spectacular water flow across the bathroom floor.

The bowl is filling now, and as you can see, the ball is bobbing around at the surface and is beginning to swirl around with the water.  OK, the water has reached its peak level and is starting to recede.  Yes!  He did it!  He flushed a rubber ball down the toilet!  The crowd is on its feet as our young hero runs off to tell his mother!

Remember, folks, WILL IT FLUSH? is brought to you by the Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Board, who urge all fathers to have a stiff drink before they investigate why there is a waterfall in the bathroom.  Remember, plunge responsibly!

Tune in tomorrow when he will see if his father’s toothbrush will flush!

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OK, enough of that fooferah.  Boo did indeed flush his rubber earth ball down the toilet a couple of weeks ago.  When he told Irish Woman about it, he wasn’t exactly clear what he had done with it, and she thought he said he had thrown it away.

That is, she believed that until this morning, when the sink, commode, and bathtub in our onlyest bathroom all backed up at the same time.  Bottles of drain cleaner, a drain snake, and seeming hours of plunging were no avail.  I came home at lunchtime expecting to be able to work from home while I watched the roofers, but instead had to head to the basement with a pipe wrench.

I expected to find the usual gunky stuff you find in a clogged drain, and you can bet I did.  But this particular mess had a surprise center:  A rubber earth ball.

Now, did my talented young man get his ball stuck in the trap under the toilet?  Not with the force of 1940’s waste disposal equipment pushing it around, he didn’t.  No, this little blue marble found its way down the drain pipe, out the foundation of the house, and about six feet out into the yard on its way to the septic tank.  It got stuck on a transition point between two pipes, and provided just enough obstruction for all of the other detritus to stick to.

On a plus side, my foreign language skills got a workout, because I was cussing in three languages as I tore into the problem.  I fabricated a tool to get at it and break up the rest of the clog out of a length of lumber and some drywall screws, and got quite funky as I went elbow deep down the sewer pipe trying to fish the darn thing out.  Eventually I was successful, and the biohazard problem in our basement is all cleaned up too.

I now know I love that little boy with all my heart.  Because if I didn’t, I’d be on the national news tonight.

To quote Irish Woman, we knew the earth was going down the crapper; we just always figured that was a figure of speech.  I swear, that boy makes me glad I’m done having kids.