If the little foam padded seat on your kid’s high chair develops cracks, just throw it away and get a new one. If you don’t, you’ll likely wake up one morning and, in your dazy barefooted morning blur, find maggots all over the seat and making a beeline (well, as fast as the little things can crawl) toward your trash can.
Oh my god, I’ve created a monster! I wasn’t betting on … <shudder> … maggots in my thread…
When *potatoes * become liquid, be glad you’re married. (Thank you, thank you, Spry Spouse!)
Being a college student, I love using my slow cooker. I can put stuff in there, go to class, and when I come home it’s done. And it can keep the stuff hot for however long it takes me to eat it all.
Or not eat it all.
After it’s been several days and I no longer want the stuff, I’m faced with the problem of cleaning the thing. Usually pork roast or chicken or somesuch – some solids and some liquids. Can’t dump it down the sink, don’t like putting liquids in the trashcan. Indecision reigns. For entirely too long. Do you know, if you leave the lid on, it keeps the smell from getting out? Doesn’t keep other things from getting in though.
Ew.
(note: I am aware of, and making good use of, the slow cooker liners now, thank you very much)
If you have the room, you can put liquid leftovers in the freezer until trash day and then throw out the resulting foodsicle. By the time the leftovers have melted, they have become someone else’s problem.
Brilliant! Perhaps it’s time for another “household tips” thread.
Heh, in my city the sanitation guidelines say they’ll send a special trash pickup to your house if you’ve got spoiled meat. They say “If you lose power to a freezer, call and set the freezer out to the curb. Sanitation will remove the entire freezer.” Opening that thing and letting all those bacteria out is a public health risk. They’ll take the whole thing and not open it until they get it to the landfill.
Enjoy,
Steven
GAH!
You win.
I am now eyeing my daughter’s high chair suspiciously. :eek:
Yeah, I would eye it veeery carefully. We wiped my son’s high chair down after every meal and it appeared to be in great condition. Unfortunately, the little bits of food that had snuck into those tiny cracks turned it into a festering pit of fly-baby heaven.
A hole in the wall bar here had closed down after many years of semi-prosperity when the new owners developed crack habits. They simply left town. The power was turned off to the bar for non-payment. There wasn’t much beer left because of the bad bill-paying habits of the former owners, but the two fridges half full of food were left. By the time the owners of the building had gone through the legal processes to reclaim the premises, the stuff in those fridges had started coming out; it had literally eaten through the seals on the doors. They had to send guys in there in Haz-Mat suits with respirators to clean the place up and it was about two years before they could get it in suitable condition to be rented out again. Not as a bar or food service place, however.
A couple years ago, my boyfriend and I went up to his family’s lake cabin after no one had been in there all winter. I went and visited his grandmother, who lives next door, while he tidied up. He came over later with a horrifying tale of two pounds of ground beef left in the microwave to defrost for six months. I would have just thrown the microwave away, but I actually think he cleaned it out. So brave.
Chicken livers make good catfish bait, but if you forget to take them out of your dad’s tacklebox in August in Missouri, you’ll get grounded.
If you leave 4 dozen goose eggs in the basement for months on end, eventually they’ll explode like hand grenades, creating the most godsawful mess and stench imaginable.
My favorite is the time my father forgot to take a full gallon of milk out of our pop-up camper in early May. Come end of August when we opened the thing to pack for the next trip… I didn’t know plastic could explode like that.
We sold the camper shortly thereafter.
Not me, my uncle.
Wonder about the smell, look everywhere. Finally look in oven, see roasting pan. Discover it’s caught a dose of maggots. Think about last roast; remember it was 3 months ago :smack: Throw roasting pan on lawn and leave it there all summer 
Autumn arrives, time for roasts again. Pan still on lawn, not clean so waterblast it and start cooking 
Tip it down the bog and flush, but not too much at once.
And then you served it to your son, right?
(if you didn’t you should have. The perfect end to the story)
My friends, I give you The Cooler of Death.
I recommend a solution of 10% Chlorine Bleach to 90% Tap Water, for a good disinfectant.
We once left a package of ground beef in a plastic grocery sack sit on a counter for a couple of months. That was fun.
We’ve had our issues with members of the rodent world. Fact #1. If you have roof rats, DO NOT try to poison them yourself. We had to live through a summer of dead rats in the walls followed by the blow fly invasion from hell.
Fact #2. If you have baited the garage look twice before sticking your hand anywhere to move things. I’m sure I was very entertaining dancing around the basement shreiking “EEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeewwwwwwWWW!” after I tried to move an old chair but stuck my hand in maggoty rat guts.
Fact #3. Follow your nose when you smell something nasty-but-familiar. It IS what you think it is. We were in a smaller place but noticed some mousie spoor so we baited. One mousie had the decency to die in the hall. Mousie #2 had crawled under my desk. I have a very good sense of smell and caught the scent early but Spouse (whose nose is only for decoration) doubted me. After a week even he could smell it so we tore the study apart. Yup. Mousie #2 had gone to the furthest possible place under the heaviest desk to expire.
I don’t understand how this is possible. Do you not use your kitchen every day?
When you’re moving from California to Ohio, do not treat the moving crew to doughnuts and chocolate milk. One of the crew will absentmindedly put his quart of chocolate milk in the unplugged fridge, seal the fridge with tape, and load the fridge onto the truck.
Two and half weeks in a moving truck in July produced the World’s Smelliest Fridge. The moving company insisted on sending out one of their damage specialists to try and clean the fridge. Specialist opened the fridge and threw up instantly. $1,300 check for new fridge received the next day from moving company.