Recently, I seem to be having problems with my shaving mirrors that I keep in the shower downstairs. The problem seems to be that they keep disappearing. Lately, my mirror disappears from the shower within 24 hours of me putting it on the shampoo rack.

I almost feel like there is some kind of angry ghost living in the house, stealing my mirror and hiding it in my brothers underwear draw just to frustrate me. Or it could just be my brother.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that if it were a ghost it would dwell in my brothers room, amongst the piles of dirty clothes, half eaten chocolates, and assorted pieces of paper scattered across the room. Then, if a ghost was the culprit, it would simply pop through the wall from sams DVD collection, into the shower to grab the mirror, back through the wall and into the black hole that is Sams underpants collection.

I'll come back to the mirror in a moment... there are some strange things happening when it comes to my brother Sam and showers. For instance, Sam and I get home from soccer, and got straight to our respective showers. In the time it takes Sam to shower and return to his room, I have showered, been dressed, called and ordered Thai takeaway, walked to the restaurant to get the food, walked home and been halfway through lunch before he finished his shower.

Yesterday, we got home from training, and in the time he had showered, I had showered, dressed, burnt a music CD, and walked to my sisters house. Odd.

But I digress... back to the case of the mysteriously disappearing mirror. Now, the reason I seem to believe that it is a ghost that continually takes my small little shaving mirror, and not a human, is that no rational human being would be so daft as to repeatedly steal a small palm sized mirror for use in Sams room.

Why not? The answer is staring you in the face... quite literally. The answer is mirrors. If you look closely at the pic in this post you will see a massive cupboard, complete with three large mirrors that happen end a few inches above my head. Even when my hair is spiked.

In fact, in the interest of factual accuracy on life of such, I measured them, and found that those three large mirrors gave Sam a total of 15,659cm2 of mirror space. Which out of interest, happens to be just over one cm2 per person for the entire population of Jamestown, North Dakota.

So with that much mirror space, why would sam go around stealing a tiny little shaving mirror that only adds another 113cm2 to his already monstrous 15,659cm2 of mirror space on that wall unit? An extra 113 cm2 is adding less than 1% of additional mirror space. Thats like taking president George W. Bush, slapping some moisturising cream on his wrinkly face and calling him a brand new president... it doesn't make one iota of difference.

There has to be some reason for this theft... I mean, ultimately Sam may be some random type of Bower bird, building a nest out of mirrors to attract a mate (*cough*Laura*cough*), but last time I checked, he didn't have feathers, and he spends too much time looking at himself in reflective surfaces, so all those mirrors would actually have a detrimental effect on the relationship... but maybe thats it!!

Vanity! Maybe he just likes to look at himself... but that doesn't really make sense either. I have far more hair and skin products than him, therefore more likely to be vain (and look better), and I don't run around stealing mirrors... In short, that rules out vanity... in short...

Ahh... it all makes sense now. "In Short". You see, one of the handy little things about that shaving mirror is that it is double sided. One side is a normal mirror, but the other has a type of built in 'magnifying' effect. Maybe the mirror should come with a warning, "Objects in mirror may appear larger than they are.", or even one saying "Don't get your hopes up buddy". Either is fine with me, as long as I get my mirror back.

So it wasn't casper the ghost after all... just my little brother. Case closed.