The Towels and Hammer Have Been Rescued

I would first like to say if you're ever at dinner with me and I go to order any beverage with caffeine in it please stop me. I had several glasses of diet coke with dinner and I am now unable to fall asleep - I don't even feel tired (hence this post at 12:30am)!

Ok. On with the real reason I write. Well, in my insomnia I decided to do what any reasonable person would do - I got on the internet. One of my friends says she is dying to know what happened with the laundry chute incident so here it is (thanks Liz!).

When my husband came home from work he tried a similar method to mine, but his way was a little smarter. He first took this rope thing (he uses it to stretch and do exercises and stuff, I don't know what it's really called) and put it down the chute so he could determine just how far down the towels were stuck. He determined that we needed something long, flexible and relatively heavy to push everything through, but was unable to produce any object that fit that description. He did try tying an umbrella to the rope, but that clearly didn't work. I don't think he even tried putting it down the chute. After untying the umbrella he said, "what we need is a cinder block."
Right. A cinder block. I was like  "See!? The hammer wasn't such a bad idea!! It just wasn't nearly as heavy as I thought it might be." I then analyzed his apparent proposal (dropping a cinder block down our laundry chute), and I reminded him that the end of the chute is at an angle, so it wouldn't work because the cinder block would get stuck before it went all the way through.
Silly me. He wasn't suggesting that we simply drop a cinder block in the laundry chute - he was going to TIE IT to his rope so he could easily bring it back up.
Now to get a cinder block.....

Yea right. That didn't happen. What happened is me unscrewing the cover to the laundry chute on our main floor so we could actually reach UP and pull the towels down.

The cover doesn't actually swing out like that. It was the massive amount of paint I (apparently) applied earlier this summer that allowed that to happen.

Here's a shot of the lovely paint job I have to fix now that the cover is back on the chute.

So, mystery solved. The towels are now safely back in the linen closet, and the hammer is home again with the other tools.

Ahh, well. I suppose that is all for now.
O - except for one more comment my husband made to me after failing to fix the laundry chute and me telling him that I was planning on starting a blog (these 2 things occurred the same night). He said to me (jokingly, of course) "Are you going to keep doing stupid things just so you can blog about them?" The answer to that question has several parts:
1) I didn't get the towels stuck on purpose - he conceded to that.
2) Throwing a hammer on the towels wasn't THAT bad of an idea - he wasn't(isn't?) ready to admit this.
and
3) No, I don't PLAN these things or plan to create ridiculous events just to amuse ourselves or other people (even though this was a kind of amusing situation).