The Stars and the Cookie Jar

So lately, we've been noticing some things missing -- jeans, a towel, a t-shirt, no big deal really (except that the jeans are N's 'nice' jeans). We're so disorganized,  and the laundry gets done all the way downstairs and then stored all the way upstairs, so we took the missing clothes as a stupid tax, and resolved to Get Organized and Find Things.

Except... this weekend we seriously, stringently cleaned our room, I did all the laundry arrears, and all the clothing that had pooled on our catch-all bedroom armchair was put nicely in the closet.  No jeans, no odd towel (I should have mentioned, our towels are mostly in sets of two). Maybe we weren't really missing any t-shirts, maybe we made a mistake. Lots of women's XXL t-shirts around here in five years. Feh.

On Sunday, I left the last of the laundry down in the dryer when we went upstairs to bed. I'm lazy, and I didn't want to wait for it, and it was that last load of random crap that's neither darks nor lights -- a towel, some t-shirts. When I went upstairs, the dryer was a) still running and b) my hands were full, with the dog's clean laundry and the cats' bag of used kitty surprise. No way I was going to touch clean human clothes with those hands.

Tonight, I went downstairs to do some MORE dog laundry. The washer was open, airing out, like I left it. But the dryer? The dryer was empty. 

I know I left clothes tumbling in the dryer last night. I might have mentioned -- I AM LAZY. I may not be sure of my judgement, but I am sure of my laziness. I left the last random t-shirts-and-towels in that dryer.

So. Ghosts? Intruder? The young boy who minds our dog? He's such a GOOD boy, so dependable, and anyway what would he WANT with our crappy t-shirts and jeans that would come up over his head and still have room for the Russian  circus? He sometimes does random stuff like sweep the basement carpet with a broom, trying to be helpful -- but our clothes are nowhere to be found. I checked the second bedroom, thinking he might have 'helped' by putting them in the closet, but he's not a DUMB boy, and I'm pretty sure even he knows we're gay and share the same room (the one with the grownup size bed. And the, you know, double closet and dressers.) 

Nothin'. Gone! So weird.