All right, enough about the carpet. It’s clean. It’s dry. Dry-ish. Mostly dry. Dry enough. Whatever.

The furniture is still oddly and crowded-ly not where it belongs. I apparently harbor some mistaken belief that we do not need to process laundry when the household is thus unsettled, so we are very nearly out of clean socks and whatnot. I may have to remedy that situation.

Entirely unrelated to the clean carpet is this: we have a dwindling supply of spoons in our house. We have something like a dozen sets of utensils, but only about seven spoons left. We’re fairly certain the kids sometimes throw them away, but we’d never actually observed them do so. Until last night. Sort of.

Audrey had finished her dinner, and I asked her to put her spoon in the sink. I’m not entirely sure she knows which part of the kitchen would properly be described as the sink, but I figured she’d follow the bigger kids and all would turn out well. A minute later, Dane and I heard the sound not of a spoon hitting the sink, but of the trash cupboard opening and shutting.

We agreed that she had probably disposed of her spoon, and that we should retrieve it. And then we both promptly forgot all about it. Until this morning, when we heard the garbage truck rolling down the street.

“Did you ever find that spoon?” Dane asked. Um, no. He raced out to the curb and discovered, shockingly, that our trash hadn’t yet been collected; he grabbed last night’s bag and tossed it on the patio to dig through at our leisure. Spoon crisis averted! Or so we thought.

The “leisure” thing happened sometime after dinner tonight, long after the trash and recycling had been carted away, their contents removed to goodness-knows-where.

Dane scrupulously sorted through the 14 gallon trash bag only to discover, sadly, no spoon. Looks like she recycled it. And so it is that we’re down to six.