Clean-Up Crew Strikes Again

Sometimes I wonder why the weirdest stuff is always happening to us.  I was pondering this last week when a thought suddenly occurred to me:  perhaps these things happen because we invite them by doing ridiculous things all the time.  They don’t seem ridiculous to us, but when I talk about them to other people, they seem surprised. 

Take our latest debacle…

First some background:  Eli has been on an obsessive fishing kick for the last few months.  He watches River Monsters and Hillbilly Hand Fishing at every opportunity (always a prudent amount, for you TV poo-pooers).  Mark has been great taking him out fishing several times a week for hours and hours.  They have been experimenting with different forms of bait.  From plastic little things to worms, to the latest thing:  raw chicken liver.

There began our problem.  I had never heard of chicken liver used for bait.  As a wimpy person, seeing it lying bloody on a rock disgusted me.  But Mark said the catfish were swarming (so were the shiny green flies).  Apparently you can buy a supply from Cub Foods.  It comes in a tub that looks like butter.

An unexpected torrential downpour cut the fishing trip short.  Mark, Eli, the fishing rods and the butter container of chicken liver went back in the van to head home.  Since there were still good livers remaining, Mark decided to refrigerate the remainder for the next trip.  Unfortunately, he noticed that the butter container was not leak-proof.  It was trailing chicken blood all over the garage floor.  Disgusted, Mark decided to toss the whole container.  He triple bagged it with some our endless supply of grocery store bags and dumped it in our garbage bin. 

Advance 18 hours.  It is Sunday and we were just returning from church and our weekly Sam’s Club run.  The temperatures were flaming into the 100s again so we were blasting the A/C.  Just as we pulled into the garage, the smell inside the car abruptly changed to “Extremely Foul”.  Something was certainly amiss.  As I unloaded the kids and carried giant boxes of cereal into the house, Mark traced the smell back to the garbage can.  It had a lid on it, but there were some air openings (like where the violent garbage man pulled the tote handle off).  He decided that the best option was to get the stinky can as far from our garage as possible. After he started to haul it, I heard an exclamation.  There was a large pool of blood on the floor under the garbage can… and a hoard of flies attacking.  The chicken livers!  They managed to get through the three bags, then out of the holes where the wheels attach to the garbage.  It looked like a slaughter house floor.  Mark took the rotten carcass garbage can outside of our garage (still too close in my opinion). 

If you look closely, you can see a mutant fly on the yellow part of the sticker.  You might have to click on this picture to enlarge it.  It is vomit-worthy.

Afterward, there of course was clean up to consider.  I thought about googling “how to clean up a large pool of blood off your garage floor” but reconsidered, just in case the FBI ever confiscated my computer.  I told Mark to just start dumping bleach all over it.  But then what do we do about all the pools of bleach?  Ah ha!  We remembered back to the gasoline spill “issue” we had several months ago.  I told Mark to throw cat litter on top of the bleach to soak it up.  Turns out it sizzles and possibly lets off toxic fumes.  We kept our garage open for hours after, though signs suggest we may have already suffered brain damage.  

Rotten blood+bleach+cat litter = Unpleasantness

After we resolved the haz mat situation (again!), we had to deal with the rotting garbage can baking in the mid-day sun.  We carried it to a nearby drop-off location.  It was a two-man job.  Since the thought of being swarming flies and blood dripping on my feet repulsed me, I filled a squirt bottle with white vinegar (I once read online that flies hate it) and liberally doused the outside of the can with it.  I felt the need to keep squirting as we carried the can.  Mark was less than pleased with this since it kept splashing all over his arms and face.  I felt fine with it.  Finally, the whole can was disposed of, the bloody cat litter mess was cleaned up and the garage was sterilized.  Disaster was mostly averted.

Since then, fishing with chicken livers has infinitely lost its appeal - my boys are back to worms. 

As I said before, it seems like these kinds of things happen to us regularly.  Do they not happen to other people?  Maybe they do but they just have enough tact not to share the disgusting details with the entire world. 

Tact.  I better google this.