appetite killer
Sep. 25th, 2006 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanThere are two pieces of background information you need in order to understand what happened last night.
One is that since I'm not home much during the week, I tend do all my cooking on Sunday. I pull everything out of the fridge, fill the compost bucket with everything that's green when it's supposed to be yellow, brown when it's supposed to be green, and fuzzy when it's supposed to be smooth. Everything that remains gets chopped, baked, stewed, sauced, dosed liberally with garlic, dolloped into microwavable containers and stuffed into the freezers for lunches yet to come. It's a serious assembly line. It's not unusual for people who are visiting my house on a Sunday afternoon to be fed one meal while three others bubble away on the stove.
Since I mainly do this on Sundays, the stove can easily sit completely untouched for the other six days of the week.
The second factor is that we have rodents in our house. Along with the occasional rat there is a pretty steady stream of mice scurrying around at night and leaving little black pellets under the sink. So we have traps set in strategic locations around the house, ususally where I have actually seen the little buggers. So there is one in the tool cupboard, one near the fridge, one behind the bread box - and one resting on a little shelf that runs behind the stove, just below the level of the burners.
Usually I check the traps every couple of days or so, but last week was a marathon of going to bed late and getting up early and my normal routines were getting more than a little frayed around the edges.
You can see where this is going, right?
I made gumbo and rice last night on the stovetop and stuck an apple pie in the oven to cook while I chopped up vegetables for an enormous salad and mashed up a bowl of really garlicky guacamole. I was hurrying because we had concert tickets and I wanted to get everything properly sealed up and ready to put away before we left the house. I was almost finished and just ladelling the cooling gumbo into the containers when I started thinking it really didn't smell right.
Had I messed up and used vegetables that weren't good? Maybe the sausage had been off? I'd kept it in the freezer. Man, there really is a kind of a low-level rotton smell that's really nasty. Maybe I should throw it out, just in case. Gods, it smells just like when my snake doesn't eat one of her rats and it lies under the heat lamp overnight...
Oh! Oh man!
The mouse looked like it had been in the trap for a couple of days before the heat from the stove alerted me to it's presence. It was the second... or maybe the third grossest thing I've ever had to clean up.
Axel made sympathetic noises from the other room, but very pointedly did not get up from his computer. He tells me he was busy putting his boots on.
One is that since I'm not home much during the week, I tend do all my cooking on Sunday. I pull everything out of the fridge, fill the compost bucket with everything that's green when it's supposed to be yellow, brown when it's supposed to be green, and fuzzy when it's supposed to be smooth. Everything that remains gets chopped, baked, stewed, sauced, dosed liberally with garlic, dolloped into microwavable containers and stuffed into the freezers for lunches yet to come. It's a serious assembly line. It's not unusual for people who are visiting my house on a Sunday afternoon to be fed one meal while three others bubble away on the stove.
Since I mainly do this on Sundays, the stove can easily sit completely untouched for the other six days of the week.
The second factor is that we have rodents in our house. Along with the occasional rat there is a pretty steady stream of mice scurrying around at night and leaving little black pellets under the sink. So we have traps set in strategic locations around the house, ususally where I have actually seen the little buggers. So there is one in the tool cupboard, one near the fridge, one behind the bread box - and one resting on a little shelf that runs behind the stove, just below the level of the burners.
Usually I check the traps every couple of days or so, but last week was a marathon of going to bed late and getting up early and my normal routines were getting more than a little frayed around the edges.
You can see where this is going, right?
I made gumbo and rice last night on the stovetop and stuck an apple pie in the oven to cook while I chopped up vegetables for an enormous salad and mashed up a bowl of really garlicky guacamole. I was hurrying because we had concert tickets and I wanted to get everything properly sealed up and ready to put away before we left the house. I was almost finished and just ladelling the cooling gumbo into the containers when I started thinking it really didn't smell right.
Had I messed up and used vegetables that weren't good? Maybe the sausage had been off? I'd kept it in the freezer. Man, there really is a kind of a low-level rotton smell that's really nasty. Maybe I should throw it out, just in case. Gods, it smells just like when my snake doesn't eat one of her rats and it lies under the heat lamp overnight...
Oh! Oh man!
The mouse looked like it had been in the trap for a couple of days before the heat from the stove alerted me to it's presence. It was the second... or maybe the third grossest thing I've ever had to clean up.
Axel made sympathetic noises from the other room, but very pointedly did not get up from his computer. He tells me he was busy putting his boots on.
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Misery Taker-Outer
Date: 2006-09-25 06:54 pm (UTC)Once, I came across a half-dead snake while out riding my bike. I couldn't let it suffer, but it was clearly not going to live. I tried to finish what had been started, and I began backing over it again and again with my bicycle. Took me forever.