What is a monkeybox?

When I was a little girl, we had a pet monkey named Amanda. My Dad worked in the produce business, so each night he brought home that days culls in a big box - spotty cucumbers, pithy apples, limp celery, moldy oranges and the like. We called it a monkeybox. It was really just trash, but my Mom would take each piece of fruit and trim it, pare it and cut it up to make a beautiful fruit platter for Amanda. Even though it was deemed trash by one, it still had life left in it and was good for the purpose we needed it. That's how I live my life - thrifting, yard saling, looking for another's trash to be my treasure.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Stinky


Have you ever had a smell in your ouse or your car and you can't find the source? Isn't it frustrating?



Tuesday morning I went into the garage and noticed a funky smell. It wasn't too strong, but it wasn't too pleasant either. I knew it wasn't a mouse because if you've ever smelled a mouse - you know that smell and you do not forget it. Ick. Not a mouse.



It had more of a garbag-y odor. (Isn't this a pleasant post?) We don't put the garbage or even the recycling out in the garage, so it couldn't be that. Then I remembered that we still had a crate of apples from the Orchard out there. It had been really cold for a few days, so I thought maybe they had frozen and thawed and that was the culprit. I sent The Breadman out to unearth the apples and he did indeed find a few "questionable" apples that were ready to be tossed. End of story.

Or, so I thought.


Yesterday morning I went into the garage and it was worse that ever. Peee-U! But, I thought maybe it hadn't had time to air out since the apple removal and just went about my day. But, then last night I went out to get the broom and oh. my.goodness. It was stinky. Stinky, stinky, stinky.



That's when the terribble horrible thought entered my head.



The deep freeze.



Oh. my. goodness.


I moved the boxes of Christmas stuff that I had temporarily stacked on it and slowly lifted the lid. You know that rush of cold air that hits you and sends a cold fog into the air. Yea, well, none of that came out of the old deep freeze. Just a warm tepid air of funk. Oh. my. goodness.


The sad thing is that it has been on our "to-do" list to clean it out and perhaps buy a newer upright freezer. But, that "to-do" item hadn't been completed yet.


So, guess what we're doing today? Tossing two whole turkeys, packages upon packages of boneless skinless chicken that I bought on sale, popsicles and ice cream that are now buckets of goo, bags of chicken from Sam's and who knows what else lies in wait. Things tend to get lost in a chest freezer, no matter how hard you try to keep it organized. I don't suppose insurance will help us since it appears the freezer just breathed it's last breath. *Sigh*


So, today think of me unloading that stinky freezer. Well, maybe you shouldn't think of me as I will be spewing expletives right and left as I gag and toss stuff.

What fun!

3 comments:

  1. MAjor grossness! Yuck.

    ReplyDelete
  2. OH, that is just the WORST smell! Gag. And to add insult to the injury of having to clean it all out is losing all of the stuff that was inside. Yuck.

    Once, when we lived in Savannah and were newly married we went to DisneyWorld for about a week in June. My DH flipped off the circuit breaker before we left. Obviously, in retrospect, this is a BAD idea for many, many reasons. We also turned off the air conditioner because we didn't want it to run the whole time we were gone (as it was June in Georgia). Golly, we were STOOPID, weren't we?

    So as you might expect, we didn't get home until quite late at night and the first thing was that we walked into an apt that was about 120 degrees. Sweltering and stuffy and humid. Horrible! And then, we opened the fridge and freezer, which of course had been off for several days. I swear the cloud that came out was actually GREEN. I had several pounds of raw shrimp in the freezer, along with quite a bit of homemade pesto. That smell, combined with the heat and humidity inside the apartment made for a stink I don't think I'll ever forget.

    I had to work early the next morning so DH had the unenviable task of cleaning it all out, since it was his bright idea to turn everything off in the first place.

    So yeah, I feel for you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12:18 PM

    My sis-in-law got flooded this summer and of course one of the things that we had to haul out of the basement was all the food out of the freezer. (Followed by the freezer itself.) And since it was June it all sat in the sun for a day or so rotting some more until the sanitation crew picked up on the block. Not a good day. Sorry you have to do it too.

    ReplyDelete

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