The Dish Towel Incident

Although I want you to think it is, my life is far from perfect. Any perfection my friends or family perceive is all an illusion. Seriously. Mere minutes before guests arrive I'm dusting and de-cluttering at a fever pitch. No need for blush when I've got the pink cheeks that only a mad dash clean up can provide. My children leave the house with pressed clothes and not a hair out of place (now that said hair is long enough for proper use of barrets). My husband and I are all smiles and appropriate kissy kissy in public. Once the garage door hits the concrete it's sometimes a different story. The stress of his job, my job (24/7 SAHM thank you very much), lack of sleep, lack of dates, lack of regular good-good (heard that on TV the other night and decided to go with it) and overall displeasure with the fact that our house seems to be shrinking all create a murky fog that creeps into our house and never seems to dissipate.
Said fog is the reason for the dish towel incident...rather how my forgetting to do something ballooned up to being what I now refer to as an "incident."
Really, it's a question of which one is more sanitary. Which one would give rise to an easier kitchen tidy-up at the end of the day? Dish towel or paper towel? We have both in our kitchen, but they do NOT hold equal ground in the eyes of those who dwell in my house. So how did a simple slip of the mind become such a traumatic event that I'm still even thinking about it months later?!?!?
At first, there were 2 dish towels. They both hung on the oven handle. No problem. All's quiet on the western front...until my oldest decided the towels looked like super fun playthings! She pulled both towels down into a cat hair tumbleweed, and proceeded to drag them, a la Linus, all over the dusty floors. Into the wash they went! Mommy brain reared its ugly head and clean, cat hair-free towels were not immediately placed in the designated area. Do the math...now there are NO dish towels in plain sight. Keep in mind that there are, however, paper towels right next to the sink, and a plethora of dish towels in the hutch, which takes up prime real estate in our small kitchen.
Enter hubby. Hubby comes into the kitchen - hubby needs a towel - hubby refuses to use paper towels - hubby over-reacts (a mere opinion) to lack of dish towels. His logical response: take ALL dish towels out of the hutch and place them in various and sundry spots all over the kitchen. I mean, towels are hanging from the top cabinets, the bottom cabinets, the drawers, the faucet, the stove knobs, the hooks on the island and even on the door of the fridge. It looked like Williams-Sonoma threw up dish towels all over my kitchen. Ugh. All I could think about was not the error in not replacing the towels with mongoose-like speed, but that this was going to take a while to clean up. Oh yeah, and how ridiculous a war strategy this was.
Strategizing is a way of life around here, and hubby had made his move. I carefully considered my options...act like a child or act like a grown up. Since the first had been taken this time, I went with the second. So, with utmost outward maturity and a string of slanderous phrases invading my inner monologue, I neatly folded up all but 3 of the towels and put them back in the hutch. Send home the troops, the war is over! Well, at least the skirmish over the darn dish towels.