Fastidious gazella dorcas, Part 2: The Emergence of Intelligent Life

Wednesday morning at the office.
3rd night in my own bed since 4 weeks of exile.
8 hours of sleep. Life is good.

Cleaning up project continues. Yesterday's objective was to properly clean the kitchen and generally tidy things up to make my apartment look clean as well. Pretty standard operation without any big events expected.

First thing on the agenda: clean the refrigerator.

For two weeks we had been stuffing the fridge for four people. And meanwhile, we never took some of the old stuff away. So, I was expecting to find some really eerie things there. And I did. In fact, some things were so foul I should have had the fridge burned just to be safe.

There is an episode in the Anime-series Cowboy Bebop where the ship's crew is attacked by a strange organism hiding, in a very alien-like way, in the cramped spaces of the ship. With almost all of the crew infected by a mysterious disease, it is finally found that the organism was born of an octopus that was stashed away and forgotten in a hidden (so others wouldn't eat it) refrigerator one year before.

Spike: "...and what was the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."

We had a carton of milk so old I didn't even want to open it in fear of the smell. We had some semi-rotten tomatoes, dried up chili-pepper, old carrots, old onions, old bread, one opened can of tuna that wasn't too bad yet but nothing I would eat, and we had some old butter, soy sauce, and mayonnaise.

Then, we had a few air-tight containers of a mystery substance. I don't know how long it had been there, but I couldn't really make out what it was anymore. I think it was tuna. Can't be sure though. It had, however, strange resemblance to the organism described in the episode of Cowboy Bebop and I think I did world a favor by getting rid of them. We wouldn't want that kind of things roaming around in the pipings of drains of our big building, infecting people with strange and lethal diseases. Oh no, we don't!

Though, I think that kind of an organism would have hard time surprising anyone since it smelled so bad you would know it's coming from a mile away.

Anyway, having saved the world from a fridge-monster, I was pretty much done cleaning up the refrigerator. I took out maybe 3/4 of the stuff inside. All old or rotten. Sweet.

After that I did the dishes that had been so generously waiting since Sunday. That was nothing interesting so nothing more about that.

However, after dishes I noticed my rice-cooker and wondered if anyone actually cleaned the pot inside it since our last home-cooking session last week's Wednesday. No, no one had.

Inside was still the left-overs of the rice we had made then, all swimming happily in a pool of light-yellowish liquid. The smell wasn't bad, it just smelled like a mixture of rice pudding and leaven. I can only imagine what kind of cultures of bacteria were living down there. And I'm, in fact, sure the whole pot of rice was on the verge of becoming a self-conscious sentient being, with its mind set on world domination. It's a good thing I realized its plans before it could take a more physical form. Blubber alone isn't yet very daunting but had we given it time to grow, who knows what could've happened!

So I flushed it.

If there is a weird man-eating Rice Pudding Monster (or any kind of a Tuna Monster) found in the sewers of Hong Kong in the later years, I claim no responsibility!

Having saved the world on several occasions, I finished cleaning up and saw I had earned a moment on my sofa, watching a few episodes of Black Adder.

My apartment is clean, and the world was saved yet again!

Blackadder: They do say, Mrs M, that verbal insults hurt more than physical pain. They are, of course, wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork into your head.