The other day I was cutting tiles for our new bathroom (which isn’t easy, because I have half the brain cells of Tim Allen, and I’m a cartoonist, blogger, and pancake burner by trade) when I had the most unusual thing happen:

I reached into my hoodie pocket and pulled out a handful of orange ear plugs. I rolled the first one up into a tiny pellet and shoved it into my ear. The second one didn’t go as smoothly. When I tried to stuff it into my ear, it didn’t want to roll up smaller. “It must be old,” I thought.

I pulled the plug out of my ear and looked at it. It wasn’t an ear plug at all. It was an orange rubber pencil eraser.

Later in the day, I reached into that same hoodie pocket for some ear plugs only to find it empty. “What happened to my ear plugs?” I thought. “They must’ve fallen out!”

I walked over to the big box of ear plugs, and grabbed a few. As I headed back to the worksite, I rolled up the first plug and stuck it into my ear, only to find that I already had plugs in my ears.

This was a new twist on the old “Hey, has anybody seen my glasses?” routine. You know the one I’m talking about. The one where somebody says, “They’re on your head.”

This was worse. I think it’s time to stop building on my house and take a vacation.

Oh yeah. My son Elijah put the orange pencil eraser into the box of ear plugs for a joke.