This recent thead included a tangent about coffee filters getting moldy, in some cases overnight! This was a lesson I recently learned the hard way, after getting back from a 10-day vacation (ew).
I’m sure on your own paths to adulthood, you’ve encountered similar situations. Tell us about it - and help other Dopers learn the easy way!
During college, I packed my mini coffee-maker away for the summer without first checking that there were no grounds inside. The spectrum of mold, each with it’s own color, was fascinating.
Scraped it all off, scrubbed the whole thing down, and started brewing again.
Just to clarify, please don’t limit yourselves to coffee-filter-related stories. I think those have been covered to everyone’s satisfaction in the other thread (though Sublight, I must say your experience has deepened my understanding of the phenomenon).
There’s probably a drip tray in your refrigerator, under the bottom drawers, or at least a depressed area designed to catch moisture. If you want to make your moving-out day as smooth as possible, you should probably get in a semi-regular habit of cleaning out that tray before moving day.
I’ve done the coffee-filter thing.
Also:
If you leave a zucchini in the refridgerator long enough, it will eventually liquify & fall through the wire shelves onto the food below.
Friends of mine many years ago went on holidays for several weeks. They had cleverly arranged things so that the only perishables they had around their tiny, hot flat was the bacon and eggs they had for breakfast before they left. When they returned after weeks of sweltering summer days their locked up flat was very malodourous. It was only then that they discovered that each thought that the other had washed the eggy plates, cutlery and cookware before they left.
When my son was about 8 or 9 I gave him a banana to eat one day. He took one bite and decided he didn’t really want a banana. I pretended to be really annoyed and told him that he would get no more food until the banana was eaten. I said I would just keep serving him the banana for every meal until he ate it. I drew (very badly) a cartoon strip of him sitting at a table withe a steadily deteriorating banana in front of him. He thought it wsa funny and took it to school to show his friends. I thought it would be really funny to store the banana for a while in the fridge in a plastic container and then spring it on him.
Many months later I was cleaning the fridge and came across the long forgotten container. I had no idea what it contained and it took a while to work out because it wasn’t recognisable as a banana. It looked like a gangrenous dog turd surrounded by an amazing hairy mould.
When cleaning the countertop, be very very careful not to hit the power strip that the deep freeze is plugged into. Not only with the smell build slowly, causing you to wonder “What IS that smell and where is it coming from?” for a week or more, but opening the deep freeze with a building sense of dread will release the worst, I mean the WORST gawdawful stench you could ever imagine. The ground turkey chubs will blow up to basketball size. The beef stew will look like road kill and smell worse. The chickens will be colors not seen since they had their feathers, and the 23 pound turkey…don’t even ask.
And your new landlord will call you up to chastise you for putting all that stuff into the dumpster on a hot July day. :smack:
If you’re going to have an Easter-egg hunt and you think you hid 13 eggs but you found only 12, keep looking. Do NOT decide that you miscounted to begin with. Otherwise you will find that last egg the hard way when, months later, you pull out the travel backpack while on vacation and find a maggot-filled rotten egg in the bottom of it.
Many years back, I learned a lesson about not throwing wet clothes into the laundry hamper on hot, humid summer days. Turns out mildew stains don’t come out.
As a general rule, odd smells should be investigated and tracked down. Specifically, it took two or three days of wondering why my living room smelled like low tide in a salt marsh before I thought to look under the TV table and found the deceased mousey that my cat had left for me. By then, it had started moving again (gag).
Or you could just move out. When moving the fridge in my new place, I discovered that the evaporation pan (fixed to the top of the condensor motor for faster evaporation) was full of a black sludge with technicolour spots, which could charitably be described as ‘putrid’.
Also, if someone tells you your new place has mice, you have to think of all those unimportant boxes you carried in and stacked, figured you’d get to eventually. The mice will get there first, eat all the chocolate bars and stuff you forgot about, then pee on your gym gear and crap in your cycling shoes.
If you have a dog, and he likes those dried pig’s ears you can buy at the pet food store, and he brings one outside, pay close attention.
Because while you’re busy having bbq with your friends, he’s burying it in your garden, and not very deep either.
Just beneath the soil, it will get rained on, reconstitute, putrify in the sun, call to disgusting bugs counties away, and raise a stink worse than a damn pig farm.
And the whole time you’ll be walking around blaming the neighbours for whatever it is that has turned the neighbourhood all reeky.
You can look forward to the afternoon you are out deadheading or weeding the garden and innocently displace the soil and the smell of hell will spew forth!
Do Not Let This Happen To You!
You want bad? I hit a forgotten Easter egg with the weed-whacker. In July. It coated my (bare; I was in shorts) lower legs with a grayish slime that looked and smelled like a roadkilled skunk. It would NOT wash off.
Amen. I had such an odd smell in my bedroom; I investigated everywhere I could think of, and found absolutely nothing. Eventually it faded and went away, and I chalked it up to a smelly gremlin.
It wasn’t until moving out many, many months later that I found the remnants of the mouse carcass under the bookcase that the cat had apparently brought in still alive. Because there was no other way it could have gotten under there other than on its own four formerly recognizable feet.
The life cycle of the common housefly is astonishingly short. Take the trash out today. Now.
The smell of rotting onion is unbelievable. Just throw that container away–really, save yourself time.
And, it’s been said before but is always worth repeating: There is no such thing as one mouse.
I finally found the source of that yucky smell that had come and gone, after the mouse carcass had dwindled away to dry bones and fur. Turns out that it still stinks like hell if you find it stuffed under a folded-up thick and heavy comforter at the bottom of your closet, once you shift that comforter aside. I threw both away at once.
We thought our mouse trap had caught a mouse. I sent Ivyboy out to the garage to investigate.
Instead of finding a dead mouse, its neck snapped in a trap, he found the sirloin steaks Ivylad had bought on top of the garage fridge. Ivylad had put them up there when he bought them a week before to rearrange the freezer to make room and forgotten them.
:eek:
Oklahoma. August. 100 degree temperatures.
“That bagger at the grocery store didn’t put the chicken in the grocery bag!”
Um, yes, he did, but the 5 lb. raw chicken rolled out of the bag and under junk in the trunk, where it sat for almost TWO WEEKS. We never did get the smell out of the car.
I had a similar experience, only it was a couple of pounds of cheese. I actually went back to the store and got a refund.
It didn’t smell when I found it under the beach chairs, but it sure was a different color. Several different colors, in fact.
We lost a gallon of milk once…left it in the trunk of the car.
Since this is apparently the cool kind of story to tell:
When you’re about to move out of your apartment, in July, and you clean out the fridge, and your darling SO suggests that you unplug the fridge now, to save electricity?
Don’t do it. Because your darling SO most likely left a package of trout fillets in the door of the freezer. You know that visual acuity isn’t his strong point. You know that you are hassled beyond sanity. Just leave the fridge plugged in.