Biological warfare

Part of the reason I've been such a lame blogger this week is that I've been downright domestic. For me, anyway. Shut up. I started with the mountain of laundry created by my trip + me telling MB not to wash his own clothes while I was gone. (There's a specific and somewhat tedious process that must be followed to avoid the sleeves of his work shirts becoming too short. Preshrunk cotton, my ass.) Once that was done, I went through the piles of mail that MB had stuffed in the buffet to await my return.

I baked zucchini bread and cucumber bread and experimental bread of several kinds, washed epic amounts of dishes (twice). I rinsed out wine bottles for recycling. I swept and Swiffered the floors. But none of it, not even the dishwashing, was quite as mesmerizing and horrifying as cleaning out the fridge:


First up, a small tub of soggy rice and flecks of ground beef, left over from a brief spell of unhappy dog belly last month. Green level. Not too bad. Oogh. This spaghetti is about two weeks old, and it wasn't that awesome to begin with. No mold, though. Still green level.

Okay, those cucumber slices are pretty grody. Aren't they supposed to be white? They look sorta gray. And brown. Blech. Blue level.

Two-week-old nacho cheese does bad, bad things if left to its own devices. Definitely yellow level, even though the cheese isn't quite yellow anymore. Could be nastier...the single worst thing I have ever pulled out of a fridge was a container of months-old Tostitos salsa con queso masquerading as paving tar. I'm pretty sure there were budding civilizations in that jar.

Wait...when did I make chicken cheese dip? Oh, dude. It looks like there's bits of salmon in here. But there isn't any salmon. Just creepily salmon-colored things. Growing. Orange alert, in more ways than one.

And then...then, my friends, I found the pièce de résistance:  a tub of potato and cheese soup so gnarly that I actually thought about taking a picture of it before I dumped it out. This soup, I swear to you, was mere days away from evolving intelligent life. This soup was poised to make its move. Naturally, because I am such a superstar, as I was preparing to scrape the truly primordial soup into the garbage, I dropped the dish. Into the trashcan. Which was full of previous horrors. And I had to get it back out. With my hand. RED ALERT OMFG NEED PURELL STAT. If I start shuffling slowly around and craving brains, please tell my loved ones it was the soup that did it.




Reading:  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

Playing:  slightly embarrassing 80s / 90s mixes