2024 has been an especially hectic year. With Thanksgiving drawing near, and it also being my wife’s favorite holiday, I wanted to try to make it extra special for her this year. My wife does all of the cooking for our family, and she spends a lot of time in the kitchen. When we bought our house, the kitchen had a combination wall oven/microwave installed. We never use the microwave and it would make cooking big meals much easier if we had a double wall oven, so I installed one. My wife is also a big football fan, and the annual Detroit Lions Thanksgiving game is always happening while she is preparing our Thanksgiving feast. I had previously rigged up a laptop in the kitchen so she could watch the game but this year I thought I’d level up and install a TV on the wall in the kitchen.
My mom came over for the day, so she and my son were having fun playing games, looking at pictures, and being entertained by our dog. It was shaping up to be a perfect Thanksgiving! As it got closer to dinner time, my son started getting grumpy. We must’ve asked him 10 times what was bothering him, but he kept saying nothing. He gets like this sometimes, and it is usually fruitless to keep trying to get an answer out of him, so I decided to just let him be grumpy. After working diligently in the kitchen all day, my wife finally sat down so that we could enjoy the meal she had been working hard on all day. As we began to take our first bite, my son says his stomach hurts and he goes to sit on the couch. Not even a minute later, it happened…
From the dining room table, I see my son running toward the bathroom with a creamy substance flowing out of his mouth and onto the floor. My wife runs over to the bathroom to see what was happening, and I followed behind while holding our dog back. It looked like a crime scene. Vomit was probably in 10 different places on the floor in the hallway, and running down the front of the sink, on 3 different walls, on the garbage can, and in, on, and around the toilet. I didn’t know whether to ask if he was OK or call in an exorcism. Then my wife comes out of the bathroom holding a small black object and saying that it probably needs to be thrown away. I looked on in horror, as I realize it’s my Logitech Harmony Elite universal remote control, absolutely covered in vomit! My son had been in the process of turning on the TV when he realized he was going to vomit, and he was in such a hurry to get to the bathroom that he kept the remote in his hand. Obviously I’m more worried about him than the remote, but this remote is one of the best universal remotes of all time, and it went out of production about 5 years ago. Good examples of it are hard to come by, and quite expensive.
After the violence ended, my wife and I began cleaning up the mess. I’d never seen anything like it. The sheer coverage area and variety of affected surfaces was astounding. My son appears to have a gifted ability to spew vomit in a manner that is very difficult to clean. The sections of it that had been sprayed at the front of the sink and toilet had seeped underneath the edges of them. There’s a good chance they’ll need to be removed in order to thoroughly clean underneath each of them. I sense my black Friday will be more brown than black. I would estimate that less than 5% of the content made it into the toilet. My mom kept yelling from the other room offering to help, but I was intent on keeping her out of the bathroom because I didn’t want a slip and fall accident to add to the chaos.
While cleaning the area around the toilet, I managed to spray some cleaner on the leak sensor installed behind the toilet, which sounded the alarm on all of our phones and automatically shut the water off. Perfect for when you’re wrist deep in what is basically sewage, and now have no way to wash your hands!
My mom, now unable to eat and fearing we had the plague, high-tailed it out of the house. When the dust settled, I gazed at the dining room table, which had 4 servings of untouched food, and various serving dishes of food that my wife had been working on all day. None of us got to enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner that we had all been looking forward to. I turned the water back on, washed my hands 10 times, and sat down to eat dinner. No one else was able to eat after that experience, but I’m able to compartmentalize just about anything when I’m hungry. So, I enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner alone, while still somewhat in shock from what I’d just witnessed. This Thanksgiving was definitely not the awesome day I had planned for my wife, but it will definitely go down as one we will not forget!