Raiders of the Lost Barqs

It looked like a bazillion-year-old frozen dinosaur had met dynamite.

Deep brown-red icy chunks dripped down the shelves, the inside of the refrigerator door, and clung to the ceiling like tiny Jurassic stalactites.

This isn't what you expect when reaching for the coffee creamer, let me tell ya.

Excavation of the fridge left me looking accusingly at a number of suspects. The guava jelly my dad sent from Florida last year?... No, that was still hermetically-sealed-- and had it really been a year already? And what's a "guava," anyway? Aren't they endangered?

(Kidding, kidding. I do know what a guava is. They run free over the Serengeti.)

Well, how about the jar of bruschetta topping? No, that seemed all right. Except for... didn't I pick that up last Fall?

And okay, what about that carton of tanger-kiwi-strawbe-cocon-orange juice? Nope. Safe and secure, in spite of its juice-oriented identity crisis.

Then I caught myself doing something that, in retrospect, seems unwise and also fairly gross. Such was my desire to uncover the source of the mess, that before I could stop me, I actually found myself tasting a little bit of the ice. "Hm. Sorta sweet!.. And I still don't know what it is."

It's just good I'm not a forensic analyst, is all I can say.

Well, further archaeological unearthing revealed that the culprit was a can of soda pop which had gotten pushed to the back of the fridge, frozen, and went out with an exuberant display of the laws of physics.

Yet, I also learned that I am apparently just an incredibly disgusting individual. Oh, it's not only the fact that I am stupid enough to taste what appeared to be an exploded T-rex Slushee. (I was not fully-caffeinated at this time, so some forgiveness should be alotted there.)

But the stuff I found in this fridge -- and I had scrubbed it out a number of times previously, too-- seemed to hearken back in time like a poorly-conceived scrapbook of my life.

A bag of two stale pitas, drier than the Sahara in summer, for snack a few months ago when I got in a Greek mood... Tupperware tubbies of meals gone by... Parts of gift baskets celebrating events I'm too old to even recall anymore... This is how I have been living.

What have I been doing instead of attending to the neolithic num-nums in my refrigerator? Well, blogging, probably. But one would think opening the refrigerator and being greeted by an Otherworldly voice growling, "Zuul!" would have gotten my attention sooner.

Alas, no. It took the Big Bang of Buoyant Beverages to help me see something was amiss.

So I sipped life-giving coffee while strolling down the culinary memory lane, saying so long to the pita.... goodbye to the busted beverage.

History is a great way to learn from our mistakes, donchaknow. So I'm hoping that the next time my refrigerator starts whispering in ancient tongues and glowing a bit, I'll know to head it off before the spewing starts.

Oh, and speaking of which-- does this milk seem sour to you?

Here: smell.


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The good folks at Humor-blogs are willing to sniff cartons of sour milk anytime.