Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
My husband and I are usually much more on top of these kinds of things. Between my obsession with personal cleanliness, and his obsession with general tidiness, I don’t know how this was overlooked, but it was. Dear Og, it was.
You see, about a month ago, I was experimenting with baking low-fat goodies, so I could have a treat without setting off the ticking timebomb that is my gallstone. I decided to try making molasses cookies, by taking my mother’s recipe and altering it - using plain applesauce in place of butter, egg beaters in place of eggs, splenda for baking in place of sugar, etc. They looked and smelled wonderful.
They tasted awful.
And so, I put them into an opaque tupperware-type dish with a pretty tight seal, and put them neatly away on the cupboard beside my coffee maker. I decided I would go through them slowly, maybe having one every time I had a cup of coffee. They tasted a little bit better with coffee. Not much, but I hate to waste things, so that’s how they would be eaten: with coffee.
The thing is, I haven’t made coffee in a while. My husband keeps turning the heat up and it’s just too warm to have coffee. I’d rather have something cold.
So, a week went by, and no coffee. The cookies were forgotten.
My husband brough home a box of snacks for his lunch, and piled that box on top of the opaque tupperware-type dish with the yucky cookies inside. It looked tidy and neat, and the tupperware-type dish was forgotten.
Two more weeks go by. No coffee is consumed. No cookies are thought of. I don’t dream of nasty cookies, so they were very easy to forget. The tupperware-type dish looks nice and neat stacked there… almost decorative. It becomes part of the background.
Another week goes by… and today, I decide I’d like some coffee. My husband is working late, it’s a bit chilly, and instead of turning on the heat, I think I’ll slip into a nice, warm sweater and grab a cup of hot Tim Horton’s coffee. Mmmmm.
So I walk into the kitchen with my nice, comfy sweater on, reach for the coffee pot, glance to the left of the machine, and freeze.
That tupperware-type dish. What was that doing there, anyway? I put it there for a reason, right?
THE COOKIES. Oh crap. :eek:
I carefully unstack anything on top of it. I reach out with a trembling hand, and touch the top of the lid.
POOF!
AH! SPORES! SPOOOOOOOOORES!
The ensuing screaming and dancing little freak out I had was the type of thing people pay to see. Eyes popping out of head, jaw dropping, hair standing on end, backflips done by running up the wall, that kind of thing. I howled and opened the window. I washed my hands and put on some rubber gloves. I deposited the entire tupperware-type dish into a garbage bag, tied it up and put it into another one. Then I took it out to the Dumpster, came inside and scrubbed myself down. I think I may have cried a little.
Spores.
I came out of the shower, wet, naked, with the look of a woman on fire (or… maybe a woman who was on fire but had been recently put out with a bucket of water, but still pretty darn mad) and ready to gun down the vile things. A spray bottle of 409 in one hand, Mr. Clean in the other. I fought colony after colony of the things, marching on my counter. I laughed at their pained screams. I ruthlessly threw out sponge after used up sponge. The kitchen sparkled. I cackled. The cat sneezed.
The cat sneezed…? Christ, there’s more! They’re in the carpet now! GAHHHHH!!!
When my husband finally came home, it was to a shiny apartment; sparkling kitchen, a freshly washed carpet, two unhappy-looking freshly bathed cats, and me, sitting calmly in my bathrobe, drinking my coffee.
“Wow, babe! The place looks great!” he says happily. “What’s for dinner?”
Those cookies were pretty nasty, anyway, even without the spores.
), and during the rains, one of the windows was accidentally left open. No big deal. Came in, saw water on floor, mopped it up. What I missed, was some water that had sneakily found its way collected under a couple of boxes (we had just moved in) at the other end of the room. Fungus ensued, which I only found a week later when the boxes were being cleared.
[/Hijack]