One stinky thing leads to another

It all started with three pounds of raw ground beef.

Sunday afternoon found me snoozing under the comforter I’ve had for twenty-five years. Despite my efforts to do nothing, those three pounds of raw hamburger haunted my dreams.  I formulated a sleepy plan.

By 3 p.m., I was downstairs in the kitchen, cooking hamburger  and tidying up the kitchen.  I deposited a Zip-l0c bag of chopped onions that had been stinking up my refrigerator into the pan.  Then I decided to add some garlic to the mix.

I have a giant Costco-sized container of minced garlic.  As I reached for it, I wondered if there’s any chance I’ll be able to use it up before we move in July.  As these thoughts crossed my mind, I grabbed the lid and pulled it out of the fridge.

The loose lid gave way and the 48-ounce container plummeted to the kitchen floor.  A plume of minced garlic flew three feet across the floor, splattering the floor and wall.

Bits of garlic slid down into the heat register.

I yanked the register out of the vent and rinsed the garlic off.  Then I peered into the open vent and wondered if my kitchen would permanently smell like an Italian restaurant.  I noted a lot of crumbs and grime in the vent, and decided to vacuum it out.

Here’s where things went awry.

I looked in the front closet for my vacuum cleaner.  It was not there.

I remembered that my son had used the vacuum in his room to clean up the shards of glass produced when he accidentally (!) hit the mirror in his room with a lacrosse ball.

I went to retrieve the vacuum cleaner and noticed my 13-year old sitting in a kitchen chair playing video games.

“Hey,” I said, “Why don’t you put that chair back up?”  I gestured toward the IKEA chair I purchased for full-price not so long ago.  It was a cool purchase, in my opinion, because it transformed from a chair into a narrow bed for guests.  Perfect for the boys’ room.

“It’s broken,” one of my other sons said.

“Broken?”

“Yeah, the metal broke last night when I pulled it open.”

I lost my mind and thus unleashed a frenzy of crazed activity and expressions of frustration.  In other words, I dismantled the chair and lugged it out onto the driveway while complaining bitterly about how my children break everything all the time and WHY IN THE WORLD DO I KEEP BUYING STUFF FOR THEM?  Something like that.

My 17-year old was all about telling me to calm down and relax and to stop overreacting.  I did not feel like calming down.  Especially when I saw just how disgusting their room had become . . . balled up socks everywhere, dirty dishes on every surface and under every surface, random bits of trash on the floor and to top it all off, a clump of cat vomit in the windowsill.

I was saying things like, “How can you live like this?” and “This is disgusting!” and “I SPENT MONEY ON THOSE CHAIRS!”  (There were two chairs, now both half-broken.  The 17-7ear old did manage to combine parts from both chairs and now we have one working chair.)

By the time the balled up socks were relocated to the laundry room and the dirty dishes were returned to the kitchen and the trash was in the trashcan, I was sweaty and irritable and rather unpleasant to be around.

And I still had to vacuum out the vents in the kitchen.

(To think, I could have avoided this entire situation if only I’d stayed in bed watching the “Snapped” marathon.)

Once I finished cooking the hamburger and wiping bits of garlic off my floor and vacuuming out the vent, I went outside and pressure washed my patio.

Then I went back upstairs to my twenty-five year old comforter and ate Girl Scout cookies and read a magazine while watching television.

The moral of this story is this:  Always tighten the lid on the giant container of minced garlic.

The end.