Forgotten items that give you an unpleasant surprise later...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

One day last week while at home, I noticed a barely detectable odor of something going bad in the living room. I sniffed all around and finally tracked it down to the area where my backpack and purse was. It had rained the day before, so I figured my backpack had gotten wet on the inside and was a little mildewy. So I resolved to throw it in the wash soon and left it at that.

The next day, the odor was worse, so I went digging through my backpack. Nothing. So I searched my purse. I see someting way in the bottom that looks like a wadded up kleenex. So I grab it. And then WHAMMO. Hit by a wall of stink.

It was not, in fact, a wadded up kleenex. It was the rancid, oozing Easter egg that my nephew had given me 2 weeks prior. I had put it in my purse and forgotten all about it. In that time the shell had cracked and the hardboiled egg inside had begun to putrefy. It was pretty disgusting.

Anyone else have any stories about similar situations?

2

Well, I have practically the same story, in a sixth grade forgotten lunchbag.

Also I have a bad habit of dropping pins or needles and forgetting about them, only to find them again later the hard way. You think a blunt tapestry needle dosen’t hurt when you step on it? I beg to differ.

3

I once came back from the grocery store in a tired and distracted state and didn’t notice that a package of cole slaw mix had fallen out of the bag in the trunk.

A few days later, I would have sworn that something had died and rotted in the car. Gad, what a smell! Now I make sure to “inventory” that trunk before I close it!

4

Ugh, last summer we had a backyard cookout at our summer cottage and I served cupcakes out of a very cute covered ceramic platter that is designed to look like a tray of cupcakes. The “lid” is shaped like a big pile of cupcakes. I’m not doing a great job of describing this, but the key part is that it’s opaque, you can’t see what’s inside until you lift the lid. It’s like this, except with cupcakes instead of a pie.

It was a large crowd and there was a big clean-up after, Mr. Del and my mom and my aunt all pitched in. We made several trips from the backyard to the house with dirty dishes and other supplies that needed to be put away, the mess covered just about every surface of the kitchen. We took turns doing the dishes.

Just recently, I was at the cottage doing some spring cleaning, and could not find the source of a very odd odor. Finally, I traced it to the cupcake platter, removed the lid, and almost passed out at the smell. There were two (real) cupcakes still inside, completely covered in mold … the mold was forging new horizons, sending mold tendrils out from the cupcakes to other parts of the platter. The smell was overwhelming, I’ve always found the smell of mold to be unpleasant, but not nauseating. This was a different story. It was so awful, and seemed so thick that I felt like I wasn’t breathing air, but rather mold (which I’m sure I was to some extent). It was like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, in my kitchen!

Apparently what had happened is that the person who brought the platter in from the yard couldn’t find any more room on the counter, and put it on a nearby shelf along with other dishes to be cleaned. However, coincidentally, the shelf is where I keep the platter on display when it isn’t in use, so when I gathered up the dirty dishes, I assumed the platter had already been washed in one of the first batches and returned to its usual place.

I have soaked this thing overnight in scalding water, with bleach, and to me, it still has a very faint smell of mold. This could very well all be in my head, but I’m convinced I can still smell it and won’t use it to serve food any more.

Zsofia, in our house, we always joke that that’s the best/fastest way to find a dropped needle. Take off your shoes! If you keep your shoes on, you’ll never find it no matter how hard you look.

5

HA!
I gotcha all beat! :slight_smile:

When we lived in Chattanooga in the 80’s, Mom left a package of ground beef, wrapped in plastic & with 2 bags on it, sitting on the kitchen counter.
And forgot it.

It took a while to ripen. :dubious:

It took a while to swell enough to break the shrinkwrap. :eek:
The smell had to leak out of 2 plastic sacks, knotted shut. :eek: :eek:

We found it…6 weeks after she bought it!!!
To this very day, we speak of Mom’s Carrion Collection. :smiley:

6

Well… er…

I once was feeling artistic, my muse was feeling whimsical, and I carved a pig out of one “block” of Spam. Cute little bugger, too. I did this at a friend’s house, and he was so pleased with it, he asked if he could keep it. He put it in a clear tupperware dish, so he could “preserve” it and see it, or put it on display. I warned him that it would likely go bad, however, my admonishments ran more along the lines of: “Please don’t eat it…” (Heck, it probably goes bad the second it’s out of the tin).

I visited my friend a few weeks after giving him the pig sculpture, and I noticed a very odd smell coming from his kitchen. Apparently he’d put my little pig on a high shelf, and had failed to notice our little buddy was growing an interesting blue fuxx. By the time I came over and saw him, he had weird, straight-as-a-pin moldy threads growing off of him, covering the inside of the container. And the smell! Og almighty. Brought tears to our eyes.

We threw piggy out, tupperware and all.

7

That’s fuzz.

Also, it was the pig that had the straight-as-a-pin mold growing on it, not my friend.

8

**Chia pig! **

9

About three weeks ago LilMiss and I did our fairly oft run for doughnuts in the morning. She was thirsty so I bought her a pint bottle of milk. When we got to school I asked whether she drank it all.

“Of course I did!” Seeing she had the doughnut bag in her hand I asked whether the empty milk bottle was in it. “Yeah”.

:dubious: A week of cold weather goes by, life is fine. Then we hit a warm spell. I open the car door and noticed a slightly stale odor. No big deal. The following warm day it’s worse. The next day I opened the door and WHUMPF. The stench almost knocked me over. After I finished dry heaving, I asked LilMiss if she had thrown away her milk bottle as I had asked. “I think I did”. Uh, no you didn’t.

It had rolled under the drivers seat and opened a bit. Lysol couldn’t take the smell out. Leaving the windows open helped a bit. I scrubbed the carpet and it seems that 99.9% of the smell is gone, but sometime I swear I get a faint whiff of it.

I won’t discuss my nephew not cleaning out the cooler after dear hunting season. It was closed from November to June. Urp.

10

Well, there you go! Why pay $20 for a Chia Pig, when for the cost of a can of Spam, you could make your own! Ch-ch-ch-chia!

11

While searching out something in the top-opening chest freezer I must have pulled out a chicken lasagne. The chest freezer is in the ‘junk’ room as there’s no room for it anywhere else.

Time went by. A horrible smell of rotting meat started to waft through the house if I turned on the ducted air conditioning. I couldn’t work out where it was coming from, but thought maybe there was a dead mouse in the roof or something. Of course the smell was actually coming under the door from the spare room, a smell that forced its way through a double-wrap of plastic bag and the lasagne’s own aluminium foil tray and lid. This went on for about a week and a half.

But the best part is how I found it. :slight_smile:

I went into the spare room, sniffed and thought ‘Ugh! There’s that smell again.’ and decided my mystery mouse must have died up in the roof cavity above that room. Anyway, I searched the freezer for food (taking out stuff and stacking it to the side on the boxed junk as I went), found nothing of interest and packed it back. Then just as I shut the lid of the freezer I look to the other side and see a foil package I hadn’t noted on my first search through the contents. Ah-hah! I think. That’ll be wonderful.

So I pick up the package expecting it to be stiff and frozen. Of course it’s very soft and the manner in which I pick it up causes it to buckle in the centre, releasing the lid (which had thankfully somehow kind of fused to the tray in the first place, hence the difficulty in tracking the odour).

The smell was… well, let me just say that I was breathing in as it happened and I stopped real fast, dashed out to the kitchen and got extra plastic bags and wrapped that container in about six layers before putting it in the bin. Even then, had it not been garbage pickup the next morning I expect the stench would have escaped to mark my bin.

12

Oh, I can’t believe I forgot my real screwup! Although it’s not really a “forgot” as much as a “lazy”. A friend and I went down to Daytona for Spring Break several years ago. We brought a cooler full of beer and cider and stuff, and when we got there we added lunch meats, and mayo, and bread, and stuff. Okay? So we come home, and we’ve got some sort of death flu, so we don’t really unpack everything.

So a couple months go by, and there’s a smell in my car. But my car is always a mess, and I didn’t think “Cooler of Death!” Recall, now it’s high summer.

So by now I’ve figured out what it is, but I’m scared to death to open it. So I ride around with the windows down for a while. This is kind of embarassing.

Finally I take the cooler out of the trunk and gingerly set it down in the garage. I’m too scared to open it by now (four months or so) so I just leave it there.

Sometime in maybe September I come home to find my dad poking at something with a pickaxe. Whoops.

I can’t even begin to tell you the nasty of what was living in that cooler. It wasn’t even my cooler, it was my friend’s dad’s. So I couldn’t just throw it out. I soaked it in bleach for a while and it looked okay. But I had an extremely difficult time not throwing up cleaning the filth that crawled out of that thing.

Oh, and my car? Still smells. Now my mom has it in Florida, and she leaves the windows down all the time. Still smells.

13

A few years ago, I wanted to make a Thanksgiving feast in our tiny little apartment. I didn’t have enough room in the kitchen or enough space, but that wouldn’t stop me! Well at one point in the preparation, my husband put the giblets in a small sauce pan to get them out of the way, and then when he needed room for something else, he absently put the pan (giblets and all) in the still warm oven. (The bird was done at that point…)

So we both forget about it, finish cooking, and choke down the food (we’re not the greatest cooks).

November turns into December, and I start to smell something alittle off, but I can’t find it. December turns to January and the smell intensifies. I still cannot find it. I don’t even notice I’m missing the sauce pan. I’ve narrowed it down to the kitchen area, but no look.

February. At this point, the kitchen reeks so bad, I don’t even want to go in there. We clean out the fridge, scrub down the sink and floors, take out all the garbage, buy a new garbage can…

March, my husband announces, “Um, I think I found it…”

I don’t know what it looked like. I left the house until he got the mess taken care of.

14

Yeah, those forgotten coolers will get you every time.

15

I kept smelling an unpleasant smell when I went by our pantry, which is a cabinet in the dining room, since our sucky little kitchen has neither a built-in pantry nor room for the cabinet in the kitchen. It smelled kind of like a rotting potato. I checked the potatoes-- they were all okay. Checked behind the potatoes-- everything was fine back there. Looked around the whole pantry-- didn’t see anything suspect. I was quite puzzled. Finally a few days later, on another shelf, I got out a box of crackers. Behind it, completely hidden, was a plastic sack containing three or four tomatoes. They were rotting, there was a bunch of liquid in the bag, and there was mold. The smell was unimaginable. My advice: keep your tomatoes in plain sight on the countertop. Not much point in keeping them from getting mushy in the fridge if you forget about them and they become toxic.

16

Aaannd, seeing as no one else has done it, I’ll post a link to the appropriate thread:

There is evil in my backyard. It’s in a cooler.

One of the funniest threads in SDMB history.

17

This is why if I find a container in my refrigerator that I can’t identify, it goes straight down to the dumpster, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and for the love of Og, do not open it.

18

When I was in first grade, my family bought a bunch of bales of straw to cover the yard after seeding. Before it was spread (in March or so, I guess), some frogs decided to lay eggs in it. I collected the eggs and took them into school in a zip-loc bag (hey, I was six) for show-and-tell. I stored them in my desk for the day–you know those elementary school desks that are hollow with a place to slide a tray of belongings in the front?

I forgot about them completely that day, and I guess they gradually got buried behind my tray of stuff. It wasn’t until mid-June, when it came time to clean out the desks for summer vacation, that I reached back and found…

A zip-loc bag full of dead tadpoles. Ugh.

19

I had a bagel in a bag in my closet for an entire summer once. EW EW EW!

20

August. Oklahoma. 100 degrees plus, not including the heat index.

Way back when (when I was married and living through the hell that was known as The Worst Four Years Of My Life), I had gone grocery shopping, put the bags into the truck, and come home. Lovely hubby unloaded the bags from the truck and brought them in, where I unloaded and put food away.

All food except for the whole raw chicken that had rolled from the bag in the trunk and wedged itself beside the box of tools we kept in the trunk to repair the car when it broke down on the side of the road.

I found it, about a week later. I think the entire car reeked so badly afterwards that we couldn’t go anywhere with the windows rolled up. (Not that we could anyway, because of course the air conditioning didn’t work in the car…)

Thank Og the car broke down for the last time shortly thereafter and we got rid of it.